The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Never more than in February 1944. The town below had first been bombed on September 10, and within weeks more than a thousand refugees sheltered in the abbey with seventy monks. “To befoul the abbey,” complained the abbot, Dom Gregorio Diamare, “was a poor way of showing gratitude.” As the war drew nearer and wells ran dry, most civilians decamped for the hills or cities in the north. An Austrian lieutenant colonel, Julius Schlegel, who before the war had been an art historian and librarian, persuaded Diamarea to remove the abbey’s art treasures for safekeeping. Throughout the late fall Wehrmacht trucks rolled up Highway 6 to the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, hauling treasures in packing cases cobbled together from wood found in an abandoned factory. The swag was breathtaking: Leonardo’s Leda; vases and sculptures from ancient Pompeii; eighty thousand volumes and scrolls, including writings by Horace, Ovid, Virgil, and Seneca; oblong metal boxes containing manuscripts by Keats and Shelley; oils by Titian, Raphael, and Tintoretto; priestly vestments and sacramental vessels made by master goldsmiths; even the remains of Desiderius of Bertharius, murdered by Saracens in the eighth century. An immense thirteenth-century Sienese cross was “so large that it could only be carried diagonally across a lorry.” The major bones of Benedict and Scholastica remained in their monastery crypt, but silk-clad reliquaries holding mortal fragments of the saints also went to Rome after a special blessing by the abbot. Two monks rode with every truck to keep the Germans honest; even so, fifteen crates went missing and later turned up in the Hermann Göring Division headquarters outside Berlin.

  As the evacuation concluded, Monte Cassino on Hitler’s orders became the linchpin of the Gustav Line. Kesselring in mid-December promised the Catholic hierarchy that no German soldier would enter the abbey, and an exclusion zone was traced around the building’s outer walls. But day by day both the town and surrounding slopes became more heavily fortified. A Tenth Army order directed that “allein das Gebäude auszusparen ist”—only the building itself was to be spared—and Hitler in late December ordered that “the best reserves must stand on the mountain massif. In no circumstances may this be lost.”

  More observation posts and weapons pits pocked the south face. German engineers had acquired “every rock-drilling machine in the vicinity of greater Rome,” a Wehrmacht officer reported. Sappers demolished abbey outbuildings and blew up selected houses in the town to improve fields of fire. More bunkers, pillboxes, and steel dugouts pocked the landscape; Italian laborers not forcibly press-ganged were offered tobacco bonuses to dig faster and deeper. Cassino schools had served as German field hospitals, full of groaning wounded from Sicily, then Salerno, then the Volturno, San Pietro, and a dozen other southern battlefields. But by late January rear-echelon units and civilians alike had fled the town, leaving only combat killers in their subterranean lairs, with orders to stand or die.

  The first stray shell hit the abbey in mid-January. The monks went about their daily rituals, which began with matins before dawn. Seven more times during the day they assembled in the carved walnut choir stalls to recite the hours. The seventy-nine-year-old Abbot Diamare and his monks retreated to half a dozen rooms on two corridors of the lowest floor. German foragers confiscated fourteen cows and more than one hundred sheep, paying a pittance, and soon the remaining beasts, including goats, pigs, chickens, and donkeys, were given sanctuary in the abbey. An entry in the abbey log pleaded, “May God shorten these terrible days.”

  Hundreds of refugees sheltered against the outer walls, in farm buildings, and even in the rabbit warren. Artillery now rattled across the flanks of Monte Cassino, day and night, fraying nerves and killing innocents. A cannonade on the morning of Saturday, February 5, proved particularly unnerving. Forty terrified women rushed to the abbey’s main gate, pleading for admission. Turned away by the reluctant monks, the women pounded on the oak door until their knuckles bled. “Insane with fear, they screamed, imploring asylum and even threatening to burn down the door,” one account recorded.

  The door swung open, the women rushed in. Soon dozens, then hundreds followed, until perhaps a thousand frightened people jammed the abbey. Fetid encampments sprung up in the porter’s lodge and the post office, in the carpentry shop and the curia hall. Four hundred bivouacked on the abbey’s grand staircase.

  The monks chanted and prayed, seeking God’s will in the liturgy of the hours. Day followed awful day, parsed by the rhythms of the divine office: matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline. “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” Benedict had warned them. Beyond the stout walls, the artillery sang its canticles.

  The failure of the frontal attack across the Rapido River had forced Mark Clark to look to his flanks in an effort to turn the Gustav Line. On the Fifth Army left, the British X Corps soon spent itself along the Garigliano, incurring four thousand casualties without substantive gains during the last two weeks of January. That left the “rain-sodden and dejected landscape” on the Fifth Army right. By driving west across a primordial outback of scarps and exposed saddles, Allied commanders hoped to outflank Monte Cassino and punch into the Liri Valley behind the abbey.

  The French nearly won through. A force of mostly North African troops led by white officers had arrived in Italy, eighteen thousand strong and uniformed in U.S. Army twill. “Look for the fellow wearing the newest and best clothes, and he’s sure to be French,” one Yank grumbled. In bowing back the German line four miles in four days, the FEC—French Expeditionary Corps—had eviscerated a Wehrmacht mountain division. Under the command of a gallant Algerian, General Alphonse Pierre Juin, recognizable by both his Basque beret and his left-handed salute—his right arm had been maimed in 1915—the French renewed their attack on January 25. A day later, the 3rd Algerian Division occupied Monte Belvedere, five miles due north of Cassino and nearly as far inside the Gustav Line. French troops also briefly held Monte Abate above Belvedere, an escarpment so vital that Kesselring anticipated abandoning the entire Gustav Line if it fell.

  “It is ordinary men who do the fighting,” an officer in the 2nd Moroccan Division wrote, “and it is all on a human scale.” Yet humanity was elusive in the Italian mountains. German barrages caused French troops to “scream out curses to the world in general,” another officer reported. “That calmed them.” An Algerian sergeant, whose skull was trepanned by shell fire, “ran screaming, tearing at his brains with his hands, and fell dead.” A Tunisian lieutenant who had vowed to be first atop Point 862 also fell dead with a bullet in his forehead; three tirailleurs propped the body upright on a seat fashioned from a rifle stock and lugged him to the summit, “faithful to his oath.”

  Six German battalions, some reduced to a hundred men, counterattacked to plug the hole and recapture Abate. A French division log recorded: “Hill 700 has been taken by us four times. Hill 771 has been taken by us three times. Hill 915 has been taken by us and unsuccessfully counterattacked four times by the enemy.” Parched colonials died while dashing to exposed mountain streams for a final sip of water; a note found on a dead French officer read, “Haven’t eaten or drunk since we set out.” Others survived by eating captured rations and firing captured munitions.

  “The human mechanism has its limits,” a French captain wrote in his diary shortly before a machine-gun bullet killed him. Juin reluctantly agreed. To Clark he wrote that his corps had dented the Gustav Line “at the cost of unbelievable efforts and great losses.” One Algerian regiment alone had lost fourteen hundred men, including the commander. German losses amounted to a battalion each day, but Kesselring still held the high ground. To Juin’s regret, the FEC “could do no more.”

  Now the thankless task fell to the Americans, specifically the 34th Infantry Division. Originally composed of Iowa and Minnesota National Guardsmen, the 34th in Tunisia had been much traduced before winning redemption at Hill 609 in the final days of the campaign; the division’s newcomers included the 100th Infantry Battalion, fourteen hundred Japanese-American soldiers from Hawaii. Major General Charles W. Ryde
r, a fellow Kansan and West Point classmate of Eisenhower’s, still led the division, as he had since TORCH. A tall man with big ears, full lips, and a sloping nose, “Doc” Ryder demonstrated a valor in the Great War—two Distinguished Service Crosses, a Silver Star, and a Purple Heart—that in this conflict was matched by his tactical acumen and level disposition.

  As the French battered the Gustav Line on Ryder’s right, the 34th attacked north of Cassino where the Rapido ran shallow enough to ford. For three days in late January, the riflemen struggled through plunging fire, minefields, and muddy sloughs. By midmorning on January 27, infantry troops and four Sherman tanks held two small bridgeheads across the river, while engineers corduroyed a road for armor reinforcements. Too late: by one P.M. all four Shermans were in flames, a jittery rifle company slid back down a hill it had just seized, and soon hundreds of soldiers were leaking to the rear in panic. Instead of five companies across the Rapido, Ryder had none.

  The attack resumed farther north on January 29, only to stall while tank crews fired a thousand shells point-blank in an attempt to carve a ramp in the Rapido’s steep far bank. A causeway hastily built with rocks proved more useful; some Shermans sank to their hulltops in mud, but nearly two dozen others gained the west bank. At five miles per hour the tanks crept forward in polar darkness, antipersonnel S-mines popping under their tracks like firecrackers. Each driver followed the faint glow from the tank exhaust pipe twenty yards ahead while a crewman in the turret repelled German boarders with bursts of tommy-gun fire. Riflemen followed in trail, finding shallow defilade against German artillery in the six-inch ruts cut by the tank tracks. Wraiths in field gray stole from their burrows and steel pillboxes—known to GIs as “crabs”—only to be shot down or captured; diehards were flushed with phosphorus. By Sunday evening, January 30, as the French drive sputtered, the Yanks held several key heights and the highland village of Cairo, three miles north of the abbey. “Believe we shall have Cassino by tomorrow night,” General Keyes, the II Corps commander, told his diary on February 1. Clark cabled Alexander, “Present indications are that the Cassino heights will be captured very soon.”

  How pretty to think so. Kesselring had shifted the formidable 1st Parachute and 90th Panzer Grenadier Divisions from the Adriatic coast, increasing the Gustav Line defenses from four divisions to six by early February. The opposing armies, as Clark admitted in his diary, now resembled “two boxers in the ring, both about to collapse.” By Thursday, February 3, Ryder’s men had a toehold in the northern outskirts of Cassino town, clearing each house with grenade volleys and a sharp rush through the door. A day later a battalion from the 135th Infantry closed to within two hundred yards of the abbey; a patrol even brushed the building’s eastern face and captured nineteen prisoners. Hills were won then lost, won then lost again, notably Point 593, known locally as Monte Calvario, a mile northeast of the abbey and the highest point on a critical saddle called Snakeshead Ridge. “Every day Cassino is reported taken, every night the rumor is disproved,” a 34th Division ordnance officer told his diary.

  Each yard, whether won or lost, pared away American strength. In a two-acre field diced by German artillery, survivors counted ninety bodies. Six new lieutenants arrived in the 2nd Battalion of the 135th Infantry; a day later just two remained standing. Medics jabbed morphine syrettes through olive-drab twill without taking time to roll up a sleeve; many kept their sulfa powder in salt shakers for easy dispensing. Snow dusted the dead, and the living woke in dank burrows to find their uniforms stiff with ice. By now few men still had their bedrolls; many had eaten nothing but iron rations and drunk only snowmelt for a week or more. A visiting New Zealand brigadier found the weatherbeaten 34th Division so hobbled by frozen feet that he considered the men incapable of launching another attack.

  Still, they tried. In the first fortnight of February, three efforts were made to break through the final mile to the Liri Valley; each failed. On February 11 alone, fifteen hundred grenades could not dislodge German defenders from the cockpit of violence known as the Albaneta Farm, near Point 593; at the end of the day, two reinforcing battalions from the 36th Division mustered only 170 men together, one-tenth the authorized strength. Their regimental commander, who had survived the Rapido debacle three weeks earlier, was killed when a ricochet shell demolished his sandbagged command post.

  A German corps commander believed the Americans were “within a bare 100 meters of success.” Alexander and Clark had perhaps attacked on too broad a front, failing to exploit cracks in the Axis line with the requisite alacrity. Yet their men had given all they had to give. To eight thousand French casualties could be added ten thousand American; by mid-February, losses in the 34th Division’s rifle companies totaled 65 percent. “Personally I’m glad we didn’t take our objectives,” a soldier in the 135th Infantry wrote home, “else they would think us immortal and make us go on forever, despite fatigue, slaughter, almost annihilation.” Allied field commanders looked to the heavens, averting their eyes from the carnage below. “Snow-clad Monte Cairo a beautiful pink,” Keyes scribbled in his diary. “Full moon over the monastery.”

  Enemy flares also drifted above the abbey, hanging “as if suspended by invisible wires,” one soldier wrote. A new mortar crew arrived at the front unaware that the building was a no-fire zone; a few rounds smacked the roof, provoking happy whoops from troops along the American line.

  Early on February 14, the 4th Indian Division sidled forward to relieve the Americans. Scarecrow Yanks stumbled to the rear or were carried on stretchers, many unable to rise from their holes without help; the 34th Division alone used seven hundred litter bearers. Dead GIs lay stacked like sawed logs to await evacuation on mules that clopped uphill in long, steaming trains; the 34th Division also employed a thousand mules. “Thank God their mothers couldn’t see the sadness and indignity of it all,” a British officer wrote. A new arrival in the 141st Infantry, Lieutenant Harold Bond, found consolation in Shakespeare. “A man can die but once. We owe God a death,” he recited, quoting Feeble in Henry IV, Part 2. “He that dies this year is quit for the next.” Robert Capa, stumbling among slit trenches crammed with dead boys from the 34th Division, had murmured an invocation of his own: “I want to walk in the California sunshine and wear white shoes and white trousers.”

  As the Americans began to pull back a few miles to recuperate, a German courier bearing a white flag proposed a brief truce on February 14 to collect the dead near Cairo. Soon German soldiers fashioned litters from saplings and shelter halves; an American detail delivered 150 enemy corpses on bloodstained canvas stretchers and carried away an equal weight of comrades in olive drab. “There were bodies all over the hill and the odor was bad,” a GI wrote in his diary. During a break the troops swapped cigarettes and family snapshots, chattering about Italian girls and favorite movie stars. An American officer asked auf deutsch, “Wie geht’s bei Hitler jetzt?” Wrapped in a slate-blue overcoat, a redheaded sergeant from Hamburg shrugged. “Gut, gut.” Rome was pleasant enough, the Germans advised, but the city “could not be compared with Berlin.” From Monte Cassino came the rattle of musketry; the local cease-fire was scheduled to end at noon. Auf wiedersehen, they called to one another, trudging off with a last load of dead. Goot bye. A German soldier trotted forward for a final handshake. “It is such a tragedy, this life,” he said.

  Saddest of all were those who simply vanished, like Otto Henry Hanssen, known to the Army by serial number 37042492 but known to his family in Monticello, Iowa, as Bud. The third of nine children, Hanssen had worked before the war as a farmhand for $10 a week. The pay was a bit better in the Army, and the job had heft: he had ascended to platoon sergeant in Company G of the 168th Infantry. A letter from the War Department reported Sergeant Hanssen missing after Germans ambushed his patrol near the abbey on February 4; the adjutant general expressed “heartfelt sympathy during the period of uncertainty.” Almost a year later, a soldier who had lost a leg and had been captured in the same skirmish would wr
ite Hanssen’s family after being medically repatriated from a German camp: “I’m very sorry that I have to tell you that I believe he was killed in action…. Us fellows when over there never thought of being killed.” In April 1945, the government would declare that soldier 37042492 had died in combat—another comrade reported witnessing his death by gunfire—but his body was never found. Bud Hanssen was twenty-nine.

  Ernie Pyle had joined Company E of the same battalion near Cassino. Two hundred men, mostly Iowans, had shipped overseas in the company two years before; only eight remained. Of those veterans, Pyle wrote:

  They had been at it so long they had become more soldier than civilian. Their life consisted wholly and solely of war…. They survived because the fates were kind to them, certainly—but also because they had become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation.