Free World War II Behind Closed Doors by Laurence Rees Page B

the difficulties faced by the Allies. Above the caption ‘The mountains and valleys of “Sunny Italy” want to see you’ it depicts a series of mountains with salivating mouths and pointed teeth preparing to gobble up Allied troops – and the largest and most dramatic of the mountains is labelled ‘CASSINO’. 63
    The monastery of Monte Cassino, founded in the sixth century by St Benedict, stood on a high peak above the small town of Cassino. The mountain was a crucial part of the German defence line south of Rome – the Gustav Line – and before they pushed on north towards the capital the Allies wanted to remove the enemy from this defensive position. It would prove to be one of the most difficult and bloody tasks faced by the Western Allies in the entire war.
    The problem of the geography of southern Italy – which so massively favoured the defending Germans – was exacerbated by Churchill's impatience. He had placed much personal political capital behind the invasion of Italy, and now saw it being – in his view – squandered. He was immensely disappointed by the failureof the Allied landing at Anzio, north of the Gustav Line, on 22 January 1944. This operation, for which Churchill had obtained extra landing craft after much badgering at Tehran, had been intended as a thrust on Rome from behind the German lines. But it had become bogged down as the German defences swiftly regrouped. Churchill famously said of the Anzio operation that he had hoped ‘we were hurling a wild cat on the shore, but all we got was a beached whale’. 64
    All of which meant that the pressure on the Allied armies to make progress in the advance on Rome was immense. But taking Monte Cassino presented enormous problems. One of the most insidious was psychological. Even though the monastery had been declared sacrosanct by the Germans, and the Nazis claimed that no Axis troops were occupying it, the high walls still presented a seemingly impregnable barrier to the troops below. There was also a fear that the Germans might place artillery spotters inside the monastery – something that Allied intelligence suggested they had already done (although subsequent investigations showed that the Germans had kept to their promise and not placed troops inside the building).
    So, in one of the most controversial military actions of the European war, on 15 February 1944 the Allies bombed the monastery of Monte Cassino. ‘We assumed that it wouldn't be bombed’, says Joseph Klein, 65 then a twenty-three-year-old German paratrooper, ‘because after all it was the oldest monastery in Europe…and we were totally surprised when aeroplanes flew towards the monastery…. We could already see that when the bombs were released that they would hit the monastery. We couldn't believe it. We were flabbergasted. We never thought it possible. Because [even though] the Germans had this reputation of not being pious – that these Christian people would do this? We'd never have believed it!’
    A combination of bombing and artillery turned the monastery to rubble. The New York Times described the operation as the ‘worst aerial and artillery onslaught ever directed against a single building’. 66 But whilst the propaganda effect on the Allied troopsbelow was undoubtedly strong, the destruction of the monastery presented the German defenders with an unexpected opportunity. ‘A fixed building in the middle of terrain normally doesn't offer any possibility of defence’, says Klein. ‘We would never go into a complete building because you can be seen, [but] once the building is destroyed, then the human being is blurred into the ruins and becomes part of the terrain. This monastery as long as it stood there and was undamaged was totally useless…. [But] when the monastery was destroyed, we immediately occupied it…. I was up there a few times and it was excellent protection. It offered wonderful possibilities of defence’.
    In all, the Allies were to mount