Tug of War

by Shelfold Bidwell

  But statistics are inadequate to describe the condition of these divisions. Shells are not respecters of individuals. The brave men and the key men seem to receive more than their share of wounds and death; companies are demoralised by the removal of experienced and trusted officers and NCOs. Battalions are unbalanced when companies have to amalgamate because of casualties. They will recover with rest and reinforcement, but only if an experienced nucleus has survived and with it the sense of having fought stoutly and effectively.

  Frightful though their casualties were, the 34th did leave the hill with honour. Fred Majdalany, a company commander in the British 78th Infantry Division which fought at Cassino later, wrote this of them:

  The performance of the 34th Division at Cassino must rank with the finest feats of arms carried out by any soldiers during the war. When at last they were relieved by the 4th Indian Division fifty of those few who had held on to the last were too numbed with cold and exhaustion to move. They could still man their positions but they could not move out of them unaided. They were carried out on stretchers.5

  A few days later, the National Guard Division we saw at Salerno, the 45th, was earning the grudging respect of the Germans at Anzio for its stubborn defence of the Via Anziate between Aprilia and the Lateral Road at Anzio. There it was the Germans who were massacred, stopped by the same excellent artillery which had held them on the Sele in September 1943.

  * The 90th Panzer Grenadier Division was the resurrected “90th Light”, lost in Tunisia and the renowned and respected opponent of the Eighth Army in the Desert War. It had been the first of the Afrika Korps divisions to arrive in 1941 when it was called the 5th Light Division.

  * Ersatz Battallionen were frequently used to defend the line in an emergency.

  * The American historians often use the term “stragglers” for men who deliberately leave the ranks to escape from the battlefield. The British term is “deserter”, a small but important distinction, as in British usage a straggler is a man separated involuntarily from his unit, e.g., in a night attack, or when a column is bombed.

  * Both sides built sangars (Urdu), or breastworks of loose stones where the ground was too rocky to dig.

  11

  THE TORCH IS THROWN

  On the evening of February 11 “Al” Gruenther, Clark’s chief of staff, phoned Freyberg and told him: “The torch is thrown to you.” Alexander and Clark had agreed on the 8th that if the 2nd Corps had not broken the Cassino position by the end of the 11th the New Zealand Corps would take over the offensive at dusk on the 12th and complete the task. Gruenther had just heard from the 2nd Corps that its final effort had failed and Freyberg was ready with a plan dated February 9th. (For reasons that seemed good at the time a British corps HQ was not introduced into the battle, nor were the reinforcing divisions placed directly under Keyes. Freyberg was ordered to form a corps HQ, ad hoc and untrained, to command the 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian Divisions responsible to HQ Fifth Army. It was a bad arrangement and led to the complex of errors in formation and decision that are associated with the Battles of Cassino.)

  The reader may compare the action set in motion to passing a baton in a relay race: or, in reality, he may visualise incoming teams of well-fed and rested officers receiving information from exhausted incumbents and the silent files of their men slipping into slit trenches in the dead of night, taking over marked maps, target lists, code-words and the rest. Fresh muscle and full ranks joining the fray – one good heave and over she goes! But it was not to be like that at all. Neither Freyberg nor his corps staff expected that their takeover would be straightforward.

  Put simply, Freyberg’s orders were to place the 4th Indian Division behind the positions occupied by the 34th and 36th Divisions in the Snakeshead and M. Castellone areas and carry on the attack that had stalled so close to its goal. At that moment the 4th Division’s leading brigade, the 7th, was in position around Caira village, but the others were still east of the Rapido. As soon as possible the Indians were to renew the attack westward beyond Castellone to cut the Via Casilina below Villa S. Lucia, and attacking from Snakeshead, seize Monastery Hill and descend its slopes to cut the road on the western outskirts of Cassino. The New Zealand Division was to cross the flooded fields to the Rapido, repair the railway bridges and causeways over its tributaries and seize the railway station on the south side of the town. New Zealand tanks and more New Zealand infantry would then clear the town and break out of it into the Liri valley. CC“B” of the US 1st Armored Division would join the advance and, possibly, the British 78th Infantry Division from the Eighth Army, due to come under Freyberg’s command on about February 17. The 133rd Infantry of the 34th Division would hold the enemy in front of its present positions in the northern outskirts of the town.

  This was the latest of several plans for using Freyberg’s divisions. Alexander had briefed Freyberg as early as the first week in January, as soon as he realised that Clark would need reinforcement, and Freyberg had taken pains to visit every part of the front before his division crossed the Apennines to come under Clark’s command as early as the 20th. The first assignment given the division was to exploit the 36th Division’s crossing of the Rapido at S. Angelo. After that had failed it was warned to be ready to pass through the 34th Division at Cassino. When the 133rd Infantry was held up in the northern outskirts of the town while the rest of the division were making progress, the 5 th New Zealand Brigade replaced the battered 141st and 143rd Infafitry on the Rapido – one Maori company taking over from two battalions of the 143rd – to allow the Americans to join the rest of the 36th Division in the mountains. On February 4 Freyberg was planning to use the 4th Indian Division in a wide movement beyond Castellone in conjunction with the French while his 6th Brigade went over M. Maiola to attack through the Americans. It is strange that Clark made no use of the 2nd New Zealand Division as soon as it was available, for at that moment the attack by the US 2nd Corps was close to success. (Indeed, give or take a few hundred yards its forward localities were to be the jump-off line for the Second, Third and Fourth Battles of Cassino.) On February 8, when the 4th Indian Division had completed its move from the Eighth Army and was assembled under Freyberg’s command, he made a fresh plan. The New Zealanders were to clear Cassino town, attacking through the positions held by the US 133rd Infantry, while the Indians captured the Castle and supported the attack into the town. This was cancelled on the 9th, when Alexander weakly agreed that Keyes should be given one more chance to capture the Monastery unaided. By the evening of the 11th he had failed completely, and Gruenther made his dramatic telephone call to Freyberg.

  The records of this sequence of plans made and discarded reveal that previous histories are in error when they suggest that it was the Second Battle of Cassino for which the New Zealand Corps was formed, and that Clark could not have employed the New Zealand Division earlier. Why did he not do so? The real reason was Clark’s objection to the progressive dilution of the Fifth Army by “foreign” divisions. Both Clark and Keyes understood that the reinforcement by Freyberg’s corps was necessary, but felt its entry into “their” battle was an evil that should be postponed. New Zealand reconnaissance parties, which had insinuated guns and thousands of vehicles into crowded and muddy fields earmarked for Americans, in some cases without permission, were resented as the vanguard of the much vaunted Eighth Army come to conquer where they had failed. Keyes had no intention of playing second fiddle to the newcomers or even fighting alongside them. The Americans were also apprehensive that they would be expected to give the New Zealanders special privileges – as the British did. Freyberg, who had fought in the Mexican Civil War and had commanded a brigade in operations over a quarter of a century before, was a formidable figure. Clark warned Keyes that he was virtually an independent commander who had to be handled with kid gloves. Clark himself greeted Freyberg cordially and Gruenther was charming and helpful as usual, smoothing out the numerous difficulties that arose when a strange corps from a foreig
n army took over in his area. But behind the façade of “dear and darling” there lurked the danger that relations could deteriorate into “snap and snarling” unless both sides compromised when there were disagreements.

  Alexander compromised with Clark and Keyes on February 8 in granting the 2nd Corps more time, although he knew that its divisions were very tired. General Lemnitzer, Alexander’s American deputy chief of staff, told Alexander, who had sent him to find out the facts, that the Americans were almost mutinous.1 Ryder denied it and said that they were eager to continue. As a result, when the torch did pass to Freyberg on the 11th it was already extinguished.2 Blumensen suggests that as Alexander wanted to keep the New Zealand Corps to exploit, it was he who kept them back on the 8th. That is not the case. On the 12th, as we shall see, he told Freyberg not to attack until he was ready and that he intended him only to gain a bridgehead and not to exploit towards Anzio as well. It was Clark who was still impatient, he who wanted to break the Rapido front at once and he who kept the New Zealand Corps out of the battle on the 8th because he thought that their participation in the battle would slow it up.3 However, Alexander could and should have imposed his will on Clark and his failure to do so was a fatal error. No better example could be found of the disadvantages of coalition warfare which handicapped the Fifth Army in Italy time and again. Had the 4th Indian Division and the 6th New Zealand Brigade been committed as intended on February 9, the battle for Cassino could have been won then and there. Instead, an exhausted 2nd Corps held on too long and a hiatus occurred while ally relieved ally on difficult ground far from any roads. The momentum was lost and the new brooms resorted to the bombing and destruction of the Benedictine Monastery above the town in a vain attempt to regain it. To describe the events that led to that sad event as a continuous chain of cause and effect would be inapt: rather, it was a matrix of national pride, of which Clark’s stiff-necked attitude to the British, and the concern with the danger to the 6th Corps at Anzio causing him to leave the Cassino front to Keyes and Gruenther, are the axes.

  Freyberg’s two battles for Cassino were failures, or at least partial failures; stages in the long process of breaking the Gustav Line. They would have attracted little attention had heavy bombers not been used to destroy the Monastery. The enormity of the act, however, and the accusation that Freyberg was to blame, that it achieved nothing, combining stupidity with vandalism, offended New Zealand pride.

  In 1950, before the Korean War claimed his services, Clark published Calculated Risk, an account of his career until he entered Austria in 1945. Lord Freyberg, as he had become, was then the Constable of Windsor Castle. Major-General Sir Howard Kippenberger, one of the most distinguished New Zealand officers, and a highly intelligent and experienced combat officer who had commanded the 2nd New Zealand Division at Cassino while Freyberg acted as a corps commander, had been appointed Editor-in-Chief of the New Zealand official history. Newspaper reports of Clark’s remarks at a press conference to launch his book reached Kippenberger in Wellington. It appeared that Clark had blamed Freyberg for the destruction of the Monastery. He had been against it, himself, he said, but Alexander had taken Freyberg’s side and he had had to give way. Freyberg was asked by Kippenberger to give Neville Phillips, author of the volume on the Italian campaign, the details of his part in the decision but he declined to be involved in what he considered a political issue. His conscience was clear, he said. Phillips should try to place the events in context and tell a straightforward story from the documents available in the archives. However, Freyberg was persuaded to talk to Fred Majdalany who was writing Cassino, Portrait of a Battle, and in 1957, the year Phillips’ volume appeared, Majdalany’s well-researched but controversial account of the battle and of the circumstances in which the Monastery was bombed was published. He had this to say of the passages that Clark wrote about his own opposition to the bombing:

  … Clark, who gave the order for the bombing, disclaims responsibility for the decision. If he had confined himself to a military reappraisal of the bombing, there could have been no objection to his being as outspoken as he liked. In fact he ignores the special circumstances, conditions, and pressures prevailing at the time. He ignores the important psychological impact of the Monastery. He ignores the fact that two Commonwealth divisions were now being required to tackle a task that had just knocked the heart out of two American divisions. He makes little attempt to recreate the context in which the difficult decision had to be taken. He merely devotes himself to an angry apologia – disclaiming responsibility for an order which he himself gave, and blaming it on his subordinate commander, General Freyberg.4

  In fact, Majdalany was wrong in saying that Clark gave the order. Clark, sensitive to the political risk in attacking such a target, passed the responsibility to Alexander who decided that, if Freyberg felt it necessary, he would agree. Clark was aware that if he authorised the bombing on the grounds that the Monastery was a military objective, and yet the ground attack failed, he would be called a vandal. On the other hand, were he to refuse Freyberg’s request and the ground attack failed bloodily, he would be blamed for the loss of lives. Clark had to make the kind of decision for which, it has been justly said, army commanders are paid. He pleaded, as one reason for passing the responsibility to Alexander, a recent instruction from Eisenhower that warned commanders against doing wanton damage on the spurious grounds that it was going to save lives. For another, he said that he was unwilling to refuse a Commonwealth commander what he would certainly have refused an American. Finally, Clark pointed out that Freyberg had right of appeal over his head to the New Zealand Government if he believed that his division was going to be endangered by his orders. On these grounds he had no other option than to ask Alexander to adjudicate between himself and Freyberg.

  There is no doubt that Clark was against the bombing. He asserted that the Germans were not occupying the place but that if it were bombed they could justifiably use its ruins. It was an axiom that ruins were easier to defend than standing buildings. The basis of his belief that the Germans had not occupied the Monastery was that they had given a guarantee to the Vatican that they would not, except to liaise with members of the Benedictine order. They had also undertaken not to take positions closer than 330 yards from the walls. Clark’s intelligence reports on the first point were inconclusive but the evidence that the Germans had broken the second agreement was provided when prisoners were taken from a cave in the hill under the wall of the Monastery. The 34th Division reported seeing Germans firing from positions well within the 330-yard limit. Such evidence might have been confirmed by air photographs, perhaps, but the use of tunnels and caves by civilians and soldiers could not easily be distinguished, for there were many refugees sheltering near the building. Common sense, though, told the practical soldiers that their opposite numbers would not deny themselves any advantages that the hill itself offered, even if the building, useful as a hospital and rest area, was only a defence position of last resort. We know now that von Senger, himself a practical soldier, had ordered that the 330-yard limit be ignored in December and that afterwards the Germans occupied positions all round the building.5

  At the Vatican, suggestions had been made that emissaries should be sent to inspect the ground so that the Monastery could be declared neutral by common consent, but the proposal was tacitly dropped.6 Politicians at the Vatican, the diplomats and even members of the Benedictine order resigned themselves to their feeling that nothing could save the Monastery from serious damage once it became “an integral part of a physical feature that was not only occupied but to a high degree fortified”. The question whether the Monastery itself was occupied was a red herring. We now know that it was not; at the time that was not certain. It was perverse of Clark after the war to emphasise that it was not occupied by soldiers, in which he was correct, while ignoring the tactical fact that it dominated a feature that was a legitimate objective.7 Indeed, once the Germans had abolished the 330-yard zone–which their dip
lomats denied they had done – and the Allies had decided to attack the Hill, the Monastery was doomed to be destroyed by shells alone. They had started their work in January and continued it, finishing what the bombers left undone in February, until the Monastery was captured by the Polish Corps in May.

  We can be sure that Clark was perfectly aware of these tactical points – except the formal abolition of the 330-yard zone of which his units had, nevertheless, given him sufficient evidence. His motives in emphasising what Majdalany called a “red herring” were ideological and political. He wanted to save the building – the Mother House of the Benedictine Order – and he was absolutely right in that. But his motives, and those of Alexander and even Freyberg, were also political. Allied civil and military leaders were susceptible to the opinion, widely expressed in the press of the time, that soldiers must not be asked to shed their blood for a building, however sacred or venerable, particularly when all the soldiers involved believed it to be defended, as was the case at Cassino. They also knew that parents of young front-line soldiers put the safety of their Bert – or Hank – before that of Saint Benedict’s, or any other shrine. They were equally aware that on the other side of the hill Nazi propagandists had already made a successful exercise out of the rescue of the art and archival treasures in the building by members of the Hermann Goering Division in December. The Germans were saying that the Allies were cultural barbarians much less concerned about the European heritage than themselves.8 If the Monastery were destroyed by American bombers, particularly if the soldiers failed to take the ground on which the ruins stood, German propagandists would effortlessly score a valuable political and moral success, on a plate. Clark wished to deny the Germans this propaganda victory which he thought was inevitable if the bombing went ahead. When all turned out as he had feared, he was resentful against Freyberg. He was still resentful in 1950, indeed, even more so when the morality of wartime bombing was no longer unquestioned, and he was prompt to blame his subordinate.