The Day of Battle (81 page)

Other bombs fell on the 4th Indian Division, the 3rd Algerian Division, a Moroccan military hospital, and a Polish bivouac. In a dozen incidents of imprecision during a two-hour period, nearly 100 Allied soldiers died and another 250 were wounded; in Venafro alone as many as 75 civilians were killed. Of 2,366 bombs dropped in
LUDLUM
, more than 300 were jettisoned or aimed at the wrong target. Less than half the total payload landed within a mile of central Cassino, while fewer than one bomb in ten struck inside the thousand-yard radius of sectors A and B.

Investigators found that flight leaders had flown no previous reconnaissance of the area. Some commanders treated
LUDLUM
too casually; heavy bomber crews, accustomed to hitting targets deep in enemy territory, often lacked the finesse required for a target tucked among friendly forces. Fifteenth Air Force also permitted bomber groups to select their own altitudes, and most flew too high despite the lack of enemy opposition. In the 459th Bomb Group, a malfunction in Liberator Dog 1-2 caused four bombs to drop prematurely; three other planes followed suit, despite orders to salvo their bombs only when the flight leader did. Similar violations in other groups “precipitated a contagious release throughout the entire attack unit.” Through inexperience and “careless navigation,” aircrews mistook Venafro, Isernia, Pozzilli, Montaquila, and Cervaro for Cassino. To make matters worse, the bombardier in a B-24H could not see the planes in front release their bombs and therefore relied on a bombs-away signal—usually a sharp kick in the back—from the navigator peering through a window. Clark and his fellow brass hats were fortunate not to fall in with the fratricidal dead.

Eaker and Devers favored prosecuting fourteen Air Force lieutenants, most of them bombardiers. Courts-martial proceedings began after an investigative report found “negligence, or at least poor judgment on the part of the accused”; yet the investigating officer, Brigadier General Joseph H. Atkinson, also recommended clemency for the airmen, whose average age was twenty-three. Charges subsequently were dropped against all but two lieutenants, who later went missing on subsequent missions.

“Let these young officers get on with the war,” General Atkinson advised. “There is a lesson for all to learn from this very unfortunate incident.”

Freyberg’s intelligence had assumed that a thousand 1st Parachute Division soldiers occupied Cassino, but in fact only three hundred or so
happened to be in the town when the first bomb fell. Thousands more held fortifications on Monte Cassino, Point 593, and neighboring slopes. Known as the Green Devils for the hue of their uniforms, the division’s three regiments were considered the most formidable German troops in the Mediterranean. German paratroopers had fought ferociously against the New Zealanders on Crete in 1941, and against the Canadians at Ortona in December. After heavy losses in the winter campaign, replacements had nearly brought the division back to scratch under the portly, cigar-smoking Major General Richard Heidrich. Of Heidrich a 4th Indian Division assessment later concluded, “He was ruthless and not overnice.”

Roughly half the paratroopers caught in Cassino on Wednesday morning outlived the day, and they described a maelstrom unlike anything experienced before or after. Explosions tossed men about like “scraps of paper,” entombing them in cellars and tunnels. “We could no longer see each other,” a German lieutenant recalled. “All we could do was to touch and feel the next man. The blackness of night enveloped us and on our tongues was the taste of burnt earth.” To another lieutenant, “We were just like a submarine crew whose U-boat was being pursued by depth charges.” Artillery fire proved especially devastating to German gun batteries, quickly destroying eighty-nine of ninety-four tubes in one regiment. The stench of decaying corpses soon seeped from Cassino’s broken stones as it did from the abbey above; one sergeant thought the very dust tasted of bone. “The men clung to one another as if we were one lump of flesh,” he said. “There was nothing we could do except weep and rage.” A
Feldwebel
who was later captured told interrogators that the Allied bombardment was so unnerving that his men were forbidden to discuss it. “Speak about women, or anything else,” he said, “but not about Cassino.”

The town was “blown asunder and beaten into heaps of rubble,” the official British history reported. Yet hundreds of bombs and thousands of shells failed to pound the town to powder, contrary to Allied expectations, nor were the surviving defenders “rendered comatose,” as planned. A subsequent Air Force analysis found that although roofs and upper floors were obliterated, just south of the Hotel Continental “two rows of houses remain intact as to first floors and cellars,” preserved by stout masonry arches and domed ceilings. The Continental’s basement also survived, along with various “immensely solid” cellars, dugouts, caves, and a long tunnel from the Roman coliseum to Castle Hill. Munitions specialists later concluded that the .025-second tail fuses caused bombs to detonate just after punching through Cassino roofs; better to have set a slower fuse to penetrate deeper into the buildings, and to have followed them with incendiary bombs that would have ignited splintered floor timbers and smoked out any survivors.
Other paratroopers survived in steel, bell-shaped bunkers designed for two men but into which as many as six squeezed during the attack. “Bombs falling three to four yards from a pillbox lifted it out of its position without seriously harming the men inside,” a prisoner later reported.

Under orders from Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army, General von Senger told Heidrich to stand fast. The paratrooper commander eagerly agreed, convinced that he held an impregnable redoubt. Heidrich believed, he later said, that “Cassino was so ideally situated from a defensive standpoint that no frontal attack could have succeeded.” Dust-caked paratroopers dug out of the rubble, stood to arms, then dug back in to prepare for the inevitable Allied assault. Sappers shored up the sagging ceilings in cellars around the Continental. The conversion of Cassino from crossroads market town to stand-or-die citadel was complete.

Still, Eaker continued to talk as if the Air Force had unlocked the gates of Rome. “The Germans would do well to bear in mind,” he told reporters, “that what we have done to Fortress Cassino on the ides of March we will do to every other position they decide to hold.”

Three hundred and fifty Allied tanks waited in the shadows to sweep through Cassino at one
P.M
. on Wednesday as a single New Zealand infantry battalion tramped south on Via Caruso along the Rapido River. Pushing into the smoke-draped town, the Kiwi riflemen found “a perplexing and dangerous shambles,” with entire blocks reduced to “sprawling cairns of stone and brick.” As scouts crept past the broken walls of the city jail, a spatter of picket fire broke the silence. Bullets nickered overhead and the cough of mortar tubes carried from Monte Cassino’s lower slopes, along with the demented whine of a German machine gun.

The planned pace of one hundred yards’ advance every ten minutes slowed to one hundred yards an hour. A squadron of Sherman tanks also trundled into Cassino, pitching up and down across the rubble “like a flotilla headed into a stormy sea,” as the New Zealand official history described it. Crews dismounted with picks and shovels to clear the road for a few yards’ advance only to find bomb craters so deep, so wide, and so plentiful that sappers would have to build bridges across them—some as long as seventy feet. After surveying the pocked landscape, now lashed with plunging fire from Monte Cassino’s east face, Kiwi engineers calculated that they would need two days to bulldoze a path to the town center, even in peacetime.

Teeming rain fell at dusk, mocking Captain Ludlum’s forecast and quickly turning the craters into moats. A second battalion followed the first into town; ordered to capture the rail station on Cassino’s southern lip, the
riflemen failed even to reach Highway 6 in the moonless labyrinth, “each soaked man…clinging miserably to the bayonet scabbard of the man in front,” as Fred Majdalany recounted.

In the dying light, a single intrepid company had scaled the sheer hillside below the Rocca Janula, seizing the ancient bailey walls and the crumbling abbot’s keep on Point 193, known as Castle Hill. It was the first good news of the day, and the last. Heidrich’s paratroopers held several strongpoints on the rising ground of Cassino’s southwest quarter, including the Hotel Continental, the Hotel des Roses, and a palazzo known as the Baron’s Palace: each commanded views of Highway 6 in both directions. Hours passed before Kiwi reinforcements surged into the fight, and they amounted to a single rifle company; not for two days would as many as three battalions invest the town. By noon on Thursday, March 16, only nine tanks could be counted in Cassino, most of them immobilized by debris, craters, and galling fire. Rain and shell fire ruined radios and cut phone lines, leaving isolated companies to fight a dozen desperate, disconnected battles. Momentum stole away, and with it the chance to win through. The great armored fleet waited in the shadows, listening for a summoning trumpet that never sounded.

Several hundred feet above the town, the 4th Indian Division had its own miseries. Two companies of Rajputana Rifles reached Castle Hill with orders to seize the upper hairpins on the Via Serpentina. But artillery chopped two trailing companies to pieces, scattering the survivors and killing or wounding the battalion officers almost to a man. Another battalion, the 9th Gurkha Rifles, scuttled six hundred yards across the mountain face through gusts of mortar and machine-gun fire; one wounded captain commanded his company from a stretcher while clutching a pistol. By dawn on Thursday, March 16, the Gurkha vanguard held Hangman’s Hill, a prominent shoulder only three hundred yards from the abbey walls.

However valiant, the feat proved a mixed blessing for Freyberg and his commanders. This isolated, eight-acre lodgment of five hundred Gurkhas on a steep brow of limestone became “a moral lien on the efforts of the corps,” as the official Kiwi history acknowledged. Operation
DICKENS
quickly became as much about supporting the doughty, beleaguered Gurkhas as about breaking into the Liri Valley.

Beleaguered they were. “The fire was so heavy we could not lift our heads up,” one survivor recalled. Riflemen built breastworks from stacked corpses and rummaged through the haversacks of dead comrades for crackers and grenades. Medics equipped with just scissors and pocket-knives amputated limbs in an open culvert. A courtyard well in a ruined farmhouse provided water, whose sharp flavor was found to derive from a
dead mule at the bottom. Indian porters ordered to Hangman’s Hill mutinied rather than cross half a mile of shell-swept no-man’s-land; after the second day, resupply came only by air, in belly tanks dropped by A-36s from fifty feet, or by parachute. Gurkhas marked their position with colored smoke, which German paratroopers quickly mimicked to confuse the pilots. In 160 sorties, most bundles tumbled out of reach, including bags of blood for transfusions that floated onto the abbey to be seized by German surgeons.

Enough food and ammo fell within the perimeter to sustain the little redoubt on very short rations; a cask of rum helped comfort the wounded in their culvert. Yet unable to ascend or descend, tormented by mortar fire and creeping snipers, the Gurkhas remained marooned hour after hour, day after day. “Surely,” a Gurkha officer, E. D. Smith, wrote in his diary, “it is pointless to keep on attacking the Monastery defences.” He added, “God help us all.”

An anxious Clark kept vigil at Presenzano, where the grumble of distant guns spilled down the valley like a drumroll. Hesitant to intrude on Freyberg’s fight—meddling in a subordinate’s tactical operation was considered bad form—Clark seethed at the plodding pace of the New Zealand attack.

“Freyberg’s handling of the ensuing attack has been characterized by indecision and lack of aggressiveness,” he told his diary on Friday. In visits to Spadger’s command post, he urged that more infantry battalions be committed to battle. Freyberg and his staff resisted, convinced that three battalions in town and three more on the slopes sufficed; others must be held in reserve for a pursuit up the Liri Valley. Clark persisted, proposing that the British 78th Division attack the base of Monte Cassino while tanks struck from the north and more New Zealanders swept into town.

“I told Freyberg the tanks to be employed were American,” Clark added in his diary entry on Friday. “He could lose them all and I would replace them within 24 hours.” Freyberg replied that when casualties in the 2nd New Zealand Division reached a thousand he intended to abandon the attack unless success seemed imminent. By Saturday, Clark’s exasperation was bitterly terse: “Freyberg is not aggressive; is ponderous and slow.”

Whether additional firepower could have sundered the German line is problematic. Kiwi riflemen had captured Cassino’s rail station and fought through the charred botanical gardens to within two hundred yards of the Hotel Continental. “Push on, you must go hard,” Freyberg urged. But an attempt to capture the hotel “through the servants’ entrance” by swarming downhill from the hairpin turn known as Point 202 ended
badly: machine-gun slugs cut down the lead attackers and sent others scampering back up the slope. Freyberg finally threw a fourth battalion into the town late on Saturday, but paratroopers had reinforced their strongpoints as well as the battered houses below Castle Hill.

“Almost every building or stump of a building contained a sniper’s or machine gunner’s post,” the New Zealand Corps noted. “The town was a place of unexpected encounters.” Paratroopers reinfested structures already cleared; forty Maoris would share a house with the enemy for three days, occasionally shooting through the walls, and a dressing station was evacuated from one cellar so that Sherman tanks could blast an enemy machine-gun nest on an upper floor of the same building. Soldiers began referring to Cassino as “Little Stalingrad.”

On Sunday, March 19, as the battle for the town stalemated, two death struggles on opposite faces of Monte Cassino decided the battle for the mountain. Just before dawn, three hundred paratroopers bounded down the slope from the abbey, green ghosts skidding on the scree and shooting from the hip. An outpost of Essex and Rajputana soldiers at Point 165 was said to have “disappeared in a smother of enemies”; moments later, howling Germans beat against the bailey walls from three sides on Castle Hill. Stick grenades twirled over the parapets into the inner courtyard, where 150 defenders fired their Brens and tommy guns through arrow loopholes. Scarlet, green, and orange tracers spattered off the walls, and German mortar rounds crashed among the tumbled stones in great sprays of red and silver.