The Day of Battle (82 page)

An arcing signal flare after twenty minutes recalled the attackers, but as night thinned in the east they struck again, hammering the castle gate like insolent Saracens while Heidrich’s gunners in the town below added more streams of fire. A sniper’s bullet drilled the British commander through the brain—“We talked a bit and then he died,” a fellow officer later reported—but once again the defenders, now reduced to barely sixty men, beat back the attack. In a third assault, at nine
A.M
., eight paratroopers drew close enough to detonate a demolition satchel beneath a buttress on the west wall; dust and smoke billowed through the bailey, and twenty-two Essex soldiers lay interred beneath the masonry. Yet every German who leaped into the breach was cut down with savage bursts of gunfire from the courtyard. Tommies ran the gauntlet from Via Caruso up to the castle keep, lugging sandbags stuffed with ammunition. Mortar barrels glowed like pokers in a hearth; after fifteen hundred rounds, several tubes lay bent and useless. By early afternoon the shooting had subsided to a sullen bicker and Castle Hill, unconquered, was paved with dead paratroopers; every Essex officer was dead or wounded. A captured German sergeant major offered
congratulations and, lacking a sword, tendered his fur-lined gloves as a trophy. But the 4th Indian purchase on Monte Cassino’s eastern slope was more precarious than ever.

Two thousand yards across the crest, below the mountain’s west face, the second struggle also played out on the Sabbath morn. Over the past two weeks, sappers had built a rough road along Snakeshead Ridge, using bulldozers and a ton of explosives to chew through the limestone. With orders to “cause chaos and consternation in the ranks of the Hun”—not unlike Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants—an armored fleet moved south in two columns on the virgin road at six
A.M
.: sixteen Kiwi Shermans, eight Indian tanks, and sixteen light M-3 General Stuarts from the U.S. 760th Tank Battalion. By nine
A.M
., the road had narrowed to a corrugated lane as the procession turned toward the abbey at Albaneta Farm. Around Point 593, the weather-gnawed bodies of 34th Division soldiers killed six weeks earlier still lay wedged among the rocks, lost boys turned to bone and stone. Tankers could peer down into the Liri Valley on their right, then swivel left to see the abbey’s fractured walls half a mile across the rift to the left known as Death Valley.

Then the noose cinched. A German lieutenant managed to lay three mines on the path, blowing the tracks off the lead Stuart. Immobile and angry, the Yank crewmen opened fire on an enemy mule train clopping toward the abbey, killing fifteen Germans and five animals with more than 80 tank shells and 2,500 coaxial machine-gun bullets. “I hated to shoot the mules as they looked like good ones,” the tank commander later confessed. But the column was stuck, unable to maneuver on the narrow trail and insufficiently protected by lagging infantry. As more tanks came to grief, striking mines or brewing up from mortar fire, German snipers picked off crewmen squirming through their belly hatches. At 5:30
P.M
. those tanks still capable of movement began to creep back up Snakeshead Ridge, turrets reversed, firing over their exhaust vents. Three Shermans and three Stuarts had been destroyed, and sixteen others damaged. As night descended on Sunday, flaming hulls stood like orange beacons along the futile path past Albaneta Farm.

General von Senger on several occasions had skirted the spiny ridge northwest of Point 593 as he stalked the battlefield with his walking stick. Using the abbey as a pole star, he traveled alone and on foot to be less conspicuous—an adjutant trailed several hundred yards behind the corps commander—and always in daylight, to see as much as possible. “No tree escaped damage, no piece of ground remained green,” Senger noted. When shell fire drew near, he went to ground or zigged and zagged, aware of “the
whistling of splinters, the smell of freshly thrown-up earth…smells from glowing iron and burnt powder.” At times he imagined that he had been “carried back thirty years and was wandering across the battlefield at the Somme.”

Little reliable information had seeped from Cassino during the first two days after the bombing. Senger knew that Heidrich often failed to report lost ground on the assumption that his paratroopers would soon reclaim it. At times it seemed the town must surely fall, rupturing the Gustav Line. “Things are not too splendid here,” Tenth Army had advised Kesselring on Friday morning. Some battalions had been pared to platoon size: forty men. Machine gunners were even forced to fire sparingly lest the raised dust betray their nests. Senger hoped for more rain.

Yet the failed Allied tank foray on Sunday and the paratroopers’ near seizure of Castle Hill gave renewed hope. Entrenched Germans held the abbey ruins with mortars, machine guns, and phones linked to a network of artillery observers; no one heeded the addled monk flitting through the ruined cloisters. Allied smoke was noxious—on Saturday alone 22,000 smoke rounds had been fired in an effort to blind the German observers—but the paratroopers simply donned their gas masks, which also mitigated the stench of decay. Falling smoke canisters caused “a number of unpleasant wounds,” but Indian troops themselves complained that the smoke “screened nothing from nobody.”

As for the town, Senger thought the initial Allied attacks lacked urgency. Enemy assault companies continued to butt against German strongpoints rather than skirting them to let follow-on forces mop up. The rubble canalized Allied armor, and German gunners, if overmatched, managed to mass fires with artillery, rockets, and even antiaircraft guns. Much had been learned from the catastrophes at Stalingrad and Ortona about urban warfare. Savage fighting remained, but there was a chance the town would hold. Perhaps the most heartening sign came from the irascible Heidrich, who despite Senger’s offer to reinforce him with an entire panzer grenadier regiment balked at sharing the glory of defending Cassino with any forces not wearing paratrooper green.

General Freyberg also prowled the lowering hills—one morning, he stopped within mortar range of Monte Cassino to listen for nightingales—and he was reaching the same conclusion as his German adversary: the town would not fall. “Another lovely day—climatically,” he told his diary on Monday, March 20, yet there was no climax, only more death and misery for niggling gains. Each day he parsed the casualty returns, his arithmetical scribbles covering the pages as the New Zealanders approached and then far surpassed his threshold of a thousand killed,
wounded, and missing. “I think you and the Boche are both groggy,” Clark told him, but Freyberg chose to press the fight despite private doubts. In a conference on Tuesday afternoon, March 21—the date St. Benedict died on Monte Cassino—he rallied Alexander, Clark, and Leese with hope of a breakthrough. “Surely the enemy is very hard pressed too,” Churchill cabled Alexander.

No breakthrough obtained. “Unfortunately we are fighting the best soldiers in the world—what men!” Alexander wrote Brooke on Wednesday with perhaps excessive admiration. German troops still held the northwest and southwest corners of Cassino and enough of the beetling slope to isolate the Indian troops on Hangman’s Hill and the Kiwis holding the lower hairpin at Point 202. On Thursday, eight days after the bombing, Freyberg asked to pull back. When Field Marshal Wilson urged him to soldier on, Freyberg replied with the single proper noun that froze the blood of any British general: “Passchendaele,” the grisly Flemish battlefield of 1917.

Alexander concurred, as did Clark, who proposed keeping Kiwi casualty figures secret to avoid alarming the home front. “The NZ Division has shot its bolt, as well as the Indian Division,” Clark told his diary, “but I wanted the recommendation to call off the attack to come from the British…. I hate to see the Cassino show flop. It has been a most difficult situation…. The New Zealanders and Indians have not fought well.”

That calumny betrayed the valor of several hundred dead men, as well as several hundred still alive after eight days on bleak and wintry Hangman’s Hill. The Gurkhas’ daily rations had dwindled to one sardine and a single biscuit per man; weak with hunger, hectored by sniper fire from the abbey gardens, at dusk they nestled together like spoons and shivered until dawn. To evacuate the survivors without the risk that German eavesdroppers would intercept a radioed order, three officers below volunteered to carry the word uphill. Each in his tunic tucked a paper bag holding a carrier pigeon, respectively named St. George, St. Andrew, and St. David. Two of the officers reached Hangman’s Hill, where they informed the Gurkhas of the withdrawal and released the birds to confirm that the message had been delivered. Despite what was described as “a considerable spot of shooing,” St. George and St. Andrew flew just thirty yards before settling on a rock outcropping. There they remained “in full view of the enemy and preened themselves for about twenty minutes, watched by the anxious Gurkhas” before flying back to the brigade loft.

At 8:15
P.M
. on Friday, March 24, some 259 Gurkhas crept down the slope, quiet as cats, between parallel walls of covering artillery. At Point 202
they picked up forty-five Kiwis and left their badly wounded with a keg of rum and a large red cross snipped from parachute silk. Swinging left down the Via Serpentina, the column slipped over the lip of Castle Hill at eleven
P.M
. Jeeps met them on the Rapido’s far bank, ferrying the men to Portella for food and hot tea. “Never will I forget that nightmare of a march,” a Gurkha officer wrote. “At times we had no alternative but to strike soldiers who just gave up interest in anything, including a desire to live.”

By late Saturday, a swastika flag flew above Hangman’s Hill. Heidrich’s patrols counted 165 Gurkha corpses, now dusted in white. “There has been a heavy fall of snow,” a German machine gunner jotted in his diary on March 25. “You would think we are in Russia.”

The New Zealand Corps disbanded at noon on Sunday, March 26, having outlived its usefulness. In the past eleven days the corps had suffered 2,100 casualties, nearly twice as many as Senger’s defenders. The 4th Indian Division in particular had been grievously injured at Cassino, with more than four thousand casualties since mid-February. Leaving behind what one British general called “that valley of evil memory,” the Rajputs and Gurkhas limped to a quiet sector on the Adriatic to lick their wounds. Other divisions were to stand by for orders. “We are now to assume an attitude of ‘very offensive defensive probing,’” Keyes advised his diary. “What in God’s name is that?”

Operation
DICKENS
was the third Allied attempt in two months to break through at Cassino, and the third failure. Through the ranks spread “a persistent feeling that something, somewhere, had gone wrong,” the official U.S. Army history later acknowledged. Most of the terrain won had been seized early by the Americans in their futile escalade in January; since then, little had been gained and many had been lost. In this most recent assault, as a Gurkha officer wrote, “The strongest defences in Europe were attacked by a single corps, consisting of two divisions, on a narrow front in the heart of winter without any attempt at diversionary operations.” The New Zealand official history conceded that “the attack showed little of that tactical originality which is commonly called surprise.”

Something
had
gone wrong. For Allied soldiers, each battle had become an attritive bloodletting on ground not of their choosing. No coherent master plan governed the offensives, but rather a succession of unsynchronized schemes that lacked the requisite heft: a division here, a division there, probing for soft spots. Limitations on the weight of metal had been revealed, first at the abbey, then in the town, which in addition to all those bombs absorbed almost 600,000 artillery shells. The Kiwi history concluded that
“Cassino was a battle of the First World War fought with the weapons of the Second,” but at times it resembled a battle of the Second fought with weapons of the First.

Failure in combat usually implies inadequate leaders, and brilliant Allied generalship was conspicuously absent at Cassino. Freyberg and other Commonwealth commanders fretted at Clark’s insouciance about casualties. Just so, but the strategy of “naked attrition”—as the British official history called it—belonged to Alexander. The British also still considered the tank a decisive arm, as if the Apennines were Alamein, rather than recognizing it for “what it was in Italy, a crawling monster which produced little except congestion, confusion and delay.” Freyberg had six hundred tanks parked around Cassino, sixfold Senger’s armored fleet, but he never could fling more than a tenth of them into the fight simultaneously. Other martial axioms had been forgotten or brushed aside at the Gustav Line: that command of the sea gave an open flank into the enemy’s rear, often obviating the need for terrestrial frontal assault; that rubbly, cratered battlefields impeded mobility, as had been seen, in fact, at Passchendaele in July 1917; that the ancient requisite for an attacker to muster a three-to-one manpower advantage rarely was truer than in mountainous terrain, which devoured battalions. The New Zealand Corps never managed even a two-to-one ratio. General Tuker, sidelined in his sickbed, considered these accumulated miscalculations “military sins no less.”

“Bombardment alone never had and never will drive a determined enemy from his position,” Clark wrote, with the thin satisfaction of a man vindicated by calamity. Cassino had thrice proved “a terrible nut to crack,” as Ernie Harmon observed in a sympathy note to Clark on March 28. If Heidrich was right, if direct assault was doomed to fail, then only a wide flanking maneuver through inaccessible terrain by a division or two of agile, well-provisioned troops would break the deadlock.

Juin, Keyes, and others had for months urged such a course, and Alexander now saw merit in their petition. To the prime minister he wrote, “A little later when snow goes off [the] mountains, the rivers drop, and the ground hardens, movement will be possible over terrain which at present is impassable.” Churchill, whom one British strategist described as the “presiding deity throughout this soft underbelly campaign,” replied sourly, “The war weighs very heavy on us all just now.”