The mountain was bad, but far worse for the weary soldiers was what stood atop it: the formidable, towering, thousand-year-old abbey of Monte Cassino. The monastery had been founded by Saint Benedict around AD 529, during the last days of the Roman Empire, partly because its excellent defensive position offered protection from a pagan world. It was at Monte Cassino that the saint wrote the Benedictine Rules, establishing the tradition of monasticism in the Western world. It was there he died and was buried. The abbey was sacred ground, an intellectual center and “a symbol of the preservation and cultivation of the things of the mind and the spirit through times of great stress.” 1 Now the grand and imposing abbey seemed to glare down at the weary and bloodstained Allied troops, a symbol of Nazi strength.
Western Allied commanders didn’t want to destroy the abbey. Only weeks earlier, in one of his last acts before leaving Italy, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had issued an executive order stating that important artistic and historical sites were not to be bombed. Monte Cassino, one of the great achievements of early Italian and Christian culture, was clearly a protected site. Eisenhower’s order had provided exceptions. “If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men,” he wrote, “then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go.” 2 But he had also drawn a line between military necessity and military convenience, and no commander wanted to be the first to test that line.
So for a month, the Allied commanders vacillated, and for a month the Allied soldiers hunkered down in the valley of death. The weather was brutally cold. There seemed no end to the rain. Many days, the clouds were so thick the troops couldn’t see the monastery, and the world was nothing but the blackened trunks of shell-damaged trees. Then the clouds would lift, and the abbey would stare down at them. Day after day, the troops slogged through grasping, freezing mud, wet to the bone and hounded by German shells. The press picked up on the misery, reporting not just on the squalid conditions but the growing list of dead and wounded men. The more the press and soldiers looked to the mountain, the more they saw the abbey not as a world treasure but as a leering death trap, bristling with German guns. The name Monte Cassino echoed around the world: the mountain of death, the valley of sorrow, the one building keeping Western Allied forces from Rome.
The citizens back home, appalled by the suffering of their boys, wanted Cassino destroyed. The British commanders wanted Cassino destroyed. The soldiers wanted Cassino destroyed. But some American and French commanders were opposed, unconvinced the Germans were inside. Brigadier Butler, deputy commander of U.S. 34th Division, remarked, “I don’t know, but I don’t believe the enemy is in the convent [sic]. All the fire has been from the slopes of the hill below the wall.” 3 Finally the British, and especially the Indian, Australian, and New Zealand forces designated for the first wave of assault on the entrenched Germans, won out. Major General Howard Kippenberger, leader of the New Zealand forces at Monte Cassino, summarized the need for bombing this way: “If not occupied today, it [the abbey] might be tomorrow and it did not appear it would be difficult for the enemy to bring reserves into it during an attack or for troops to take shelter there if driven from positions outside. It was impossible to ask troops to storm a hill surmounted by an intact building such as this.” 4
On February 15, 1944, amid the cheers of Allied soldiers and war correspondents, a massive aerial bombing destroyed the magnificent abbey at Monte Cassino. General Eaker of the U.S. Army Air Forces hailed it as a great triumph, an example of what the Germans could expect for the rest of the war.
The rest of the world did not cheer. Instead, the Germans and Italians turned the tables on the Allies, suggesting that if this was what the world could expect then the Allies were the barbarians and the traitors. Cardinal Maglione, speaking for the Vatican, called the destruction of the abbey “a colossal blunder” and “a piece of gross stupidity.” 5
Two days later, after several smaller attacks, Western Allies launched a massive assault on the mountain. Once again, the troops were turned back by heavy fire. As Brigadier Butler had suspected, the Germans hadn’t been in the abbey—they had actually been respecting its cultural importance—and the bombing had not weakened their position. In fact, it had strengthened it by allowing them to drop paratroopers into the ruins and incorporate them into their defenses. It would take another three months, and an estimated 54,000 of their own men dead and wounded, for the Allies to capture Monte Cassino.
On May 27, 1944, a week after its capture and more than three months after its destruction, the first Monuments Man to visit the town of Cassino, Major Ernest DeWald, arrived for an inspection tour of the ruins of Monte Cassino. He found the foundations and underground chambers of the complex intact, but almost everything aboveground was destroyed. The seventeenth-century church was gone; the library, art galleries, and monastery were nothing more than rubble. He located the debris that had once been the basilica, but found no trace of its famous eleventh-century bronze doors or mosaic tile. He didn’t know if the monastery’s magnificent library and celebrated art collection had been buried or destroyed, or if it had been removed by the Germans prior to the bombing. The only things of value Major DeWald saw that afternoon, as he picked through the rubble, were the faces of the angels that had adorned the choir stall, most broken but some still whole, their wide eyes staring unblinking at the great blue sky.
April 16, 1943
Rosenberg’s transmittal letter to Hitler accompanying albums of photographs of works of art stolen for the Führermuseum
Mein Führer:
In my desire to give you, my Führer, some joy for your birthday I take the liberty to present to you a folder containing photographs of some of the most valuable paintings which my Einsatzstab, in compliance with your order, secured from ownerless Jewish art collections in the occupied Western territories. These photos represent an addition to the collection of 53 of the most valuable objects of art delivered some time ago to your collection. This folder also shows only a small percentage of the exceptional value and extent of these objects of art, seized by my Dienststelle (service command) in France, and put into a safe place in the Reich.
I beg of you, my Führer, to give me a chance during my next audience to report to you orally on the whole extent and scope of this art seizure action. I beg you to accept a short written intermediate report of the progress and extent of the art seizure action which will be used as a basis for this later oral report, and also accept 3 copies of the temporary picture catalogues which, too, only show part of the collection you own. I shall deliver further catalogues which are now being compiled, when they are finished. I shall take the liberty during the requested audience to give you, my Führer, another 20 folders of pictures, with the hope that this short occupation with the beautiful things of art which are nearest to your heart will send a ray of beauty and joy into your revered life.
Heil, mein Führer
A. Rosenberg
CHAPTER 8
Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives
Shrivenham, England
Spring 1944
George Stout, dapper Fogg conservator turned navy man, breathed the first warm air of a British spring. It was March 6, 1944, a month after the destruction of Monte Cassino but still a few months before the planned invasion of northern France. Already, southern England was teeming with British and American soldiers. More than a million if rumors were right, which didn’t make for the easiest situation in a country bombed to tatters by four years of Luftwaffe raids and perilously low on food and basic materials. “The trouble with the Yanks is that they are overpaid, oversexed, overfed, and over here” went a popular saying making the rounds of London. 1 But what did they expect from young men, many still just boys in their teens? No doubt they were cocksure, but only to hide their terror. After all, they would soon be throwing themselves against the beachheads of Fortress Europe, and everyone knew that many among them would never go home.
In Shriv
enham, a small rural village about halfway between Bristol and London, the mood was different. The joint United States–British Civil Affairs corps had taken over the American School (an American-style university) for a Civil Affairs training center, and despite the occasional formation of older soldiers marching in uniform, the stone walls and wide lawns seemed very far from the horrors of war.
What George Stout mostly noticed, whenever he left the grounds, were the green sprouts. The first spring buds were on the trees, and although Stout suspected they were too early and a late frost would nip them out, he was heartened by their optimism. Recently the winter doldrums had lifted, and the previous night he had walked five miles to a local pub with a couple of his colleagues, an Englishman and an American. The pub was a timeless British watering hole: ruddy farmers with pints of ale, wood beams, stone walls, a dartboard in the corner, not another soldier in sight. The beer was mild and bitter; the company cheerful. He missed the boards of the ship that brought him across the Atlantic, their tight formation, the simple and precise rhythm of the sea. The walk back to Shrivenham through the dark and orderly Oxfordshire countryside, with its carefully prescribed fields and neat little flower and vegetable gardens, was just the thing to help Stout forget that he had already been here two weeks, and he had yet to receive a letter from home.
A navy man assigned to the army, he thought to himself. The ultimate fish out of water. Even the postmaster can’t find me.
Walking now to a neighboring village in the fresh light of a Sunday morning, he could see the messiness of the world around him. Boxwood and other trees covered with ivy. The ambling, tumbling stone walls. The chaotic sprouts, some shooting up greenly, some smashed by heels in the mud. The fields torn by hooves. The grasping trees. The meandering road. It was disjointed somehow, but beneath the surface he could sense order, an appropriateness in both time and space, a composition that appeared messy until, suddenly, you saw beneath the strokes the system at work.
Still, he would have preferred the boats. And home. And some space for his work in a world at peace. But he was a soldier now, and he had to admit this assignment was exactly, as the English said, his cup of tea. Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives. He almost laughed to think of it. They were actually putting together a unit of skilled technicians, commissioned as officers in the army, to tackle issues of conservation.
The Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA) subcommission had been formalized in late 1943 as an official joint operation between the United States and Britain, run by the Civil Affairs branch of the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT) and answering primarily to the M-5 division of the British War Office. The bureaucratic train wreck was a hint at the priority of the operation, which was buried so far down the military chain of command it was almost invisible. Everyone knew of the failures in Italy. Hammond’s office had been dissolved and replaced by a new hierarchy, but the MFAA operation in Italy—a completely separate operation run by a separate chain of command, under the Allied Control Commission (ACC)—was still struggling to become relevant. There had been no Monuments Men north of Naples, for instance, when the decision was made to destroy the abbey at Monte Cassino. That failure not only catapulted the handful of Monuments officers in Italy into action, it proved how difficult it was to create an organization in the middle of a military campaign.
The situation, hopefully, would be different in northern Europe. Civil Affairs had every intention of having a trained group of officers in place before the landings in France. The Roberts Commission had given Paul Sachs, Stout’s boss at the Fogg Museum, the responsibility of picking the Americans who would serve in that officer corps, and George Stout had been one of the first people asked to join. That was in September 1943. Stout didn’t hear anything else for months, which didn’t surprise him. These projects, Stout knew, were usually a “flash in the pants,” as a navy colleague had ingeniously (if accidentally) remarked. 2 And he never trusted anything run by museum directors.
Still, he had laid out for Sachs his thoughts on the operation. Each army, he wrote, would need a team of conservators. Each team would need a specialized staff, ten people at least, and sixteen would be preferable, including packers, movers, taxidermists (yes, taxidermists), secretaries, drivers, and, most importantly, photographers. The staff couldn’t be acquired in the field, because Stout knew from his World War I experience that in the field no men were superfluous, and no commander would give up his men. They had to be assigned to conservation duty, and they had to be equipped: jeeps, covered trucks, crates, boxes, packing materials, cameras, aerometers to check air quality, all the tools of the conservator’s trade.
In December, with no word from Sachs, rumors reached Stout that the operation was dead. He continued with aircraft camouflage, assuming the museum boys had gotten it thoroughly fouled. A pity, he thought, that the army had left it all in the hands of the sahibs.
Even when his transfer came through in January 1944, Stout remained unconvinced. “What you feel about the salvage duty is exactly what I feel,” he wrote his wife, Margie. “If it’s set up decently, it can go along and be of some substantial service. If it’s not, there will be infuriating difficulties, delays, and frustrations. I expect a certain amount of those anyway. And whether I like it or not, I’ll probably be in for it if the Army decides to go through with the program…. One thing certain: it will be, if it develops, a military job. It will not be run by civilian museum people but by the Army and the Navy. If this were civilian museum command, I’d ditch. [But] my associates will be military men, as I understand it. In the Army and the Navy, efficiency is the rule and plain honesty holds in relations with people. Bluff does not usually get very far. And so we’ll see.” 3
George Stout underestimated the sahibs. The civilian museum community, in the form of the Roberts Commission (and in time their counterparts in England, the Macmillan Commission), had been both a catalyst for the creation of a conservation corps and a guiding force in its development. It is doubtful the U.S. Army would have tolerated the MFAA if not for the prestige of the Roberts Commission, which had been formed with Roosevelt’s explicit backing, and no one was better suited to assemble George Stout’s corps of “special workmen” than the men who ran America’s cultural establishment. They were able to take the two primary lessons of North Africa and Sicily—that the army would listen to conservation officials, as long as they were military officers, and that those officers needed to arrive at the front lines during or immediately after the fighting, not weeks or even months later—and form from them the basis of a workable plan. And for Stout, at least, there was something else just as promising: They had not assigned a single museum director to the officer corps of the MFAA.
No, it wasn’t the character of the men or scope of the mission that worried George Stout as his thoughts drifted ahead to the coming invasion on that unseasonably warm March morning. It was the ad hoc nature of the operation. There was no formal mission statement, or even set chain of command. Nobody seemed clear how many men were needed for the job, how they would be distributed on the continent, even when or if more soldiers would arrive. Men simply showed up for duty with their transfer papers, seemingly at random. A general guidebook to conservation procedures had been culled from Stout’s expertise and writings on the subject. But the Monuments Men had no formal training. Most of the effort was being put into basics like listing the protected monuments in the various countries of Europe. As far as Stout could tell, there was no one even handling the military side of the operation, such as procuring weapons, jeeps, uniforms, or rations. To say the race to put together a conservation unit before the invasion of France had started slowly was an understatement.
And then there was the size of the operation. Stout had recommended to Sachs a staff of sixteen men per officer; it was becoming increasingly clear there might not be sixteen men in the entire MFAA operation for northern Europe. Stout knew it wasn’t easy to negotiate transfers through the military b
ureaucracy, especially one planning the most important operation in world history. And he was sure Paul Sachs knew more qualified men. He had taught most of America’s young museum men, after all. But Stout could count the men reserved for monuments fieldwork on two hands. Rorimer. Balfour. LaFarge. Posey. Dixon-Spain. Methuen. Hammett. Eventually, if officers kept showing up with their papers, the MFAA might have twelve men. Total. There were more men sitting at his mess table on the crossing to England—and that was one boat out of a thousand, and it fed a hundred mess tables a day.
He thought of the current Monuments Men, sitting for an imaginary portrait on a sunny hillside outside their base at Shrivenham.
Geoffrey Webb, their commanding officer, tall and lean, past fifty, a Slade Professor at Cambridge and one of the most distinguished art scholars in the British Isles.
Beside him, Lord Metheun and Squadron Leader Dixon-Spain, both older British veterans of the First World War.
The youngest of the British contingent was Ronald Balfour, small and balding, in his forties, a historian at King’s College, Cambridge—Geoffrey Webb’s colleague from Cambridge, in fact, brought into the MFAA at his suggestion. Stout and Balfour were rooming together at Shrivenham, and Stout had taken instantly to his clearheaded, generous, and gracious nature. An avid Protestant, the scholar focused his studies on ecclesiastical matters, having made the move from history, which of course had its share of religious implications and images. Having simply stayed on at Cambridge after his undergraduate education, he was what the English often called a “gentleman scholar,” a professional university man uninterested in publishing or career advancement, but rather enamored of intellectual pursuits and long, leisurely conversations and debates with those of a similar intellectual bent.
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