The Day of Battle (76 page)

The failure to exterminate the Allied beachhead carried sober implications beyond southern Italy, and even Kesselring’s optimism dimmed. Not only were German forces overmatched in the air and outgunned on the ground, but “a perceptible weakening of the daredevil spirit” afflicted the ranks, he told a visiting general from Berlin in late February. This, he believed, was “the last year of the war.” By the calculation of Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, more combat matériel had been brought to play in
FISCHFANG
than on any German battlefield since 1940, with the exception of Sevastopol, and the grim result revealed the “progressive exhaustion of the army after more than 4
¹
/2 years of fighting,” Westphal said. “The blanket had become too thin and too short.”

Believing that the high command must hear that “a turning point had been reached in the war,” Kesselring sent Westphal to deliver this revelation
in a three-hour meeting with the Führer and his military brain trust at the Berchtesgaden retreat. “Hitler was very calm,” Westphal reported, and he approved Fourteenth Army’s shift to the defensive at Anzio. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the Wehrmacht chief, voiced surprise that Hitler had listened to “so many unpleasant things.” Upon returning to Italy, Westphal told Kesselring that “the Führer appeared bowed down with care.”

Such strategic nuances were beyond the ken of those consigned to the beachhead for the duration. German engineers trucked in forced-labor Italian carpenters from Rome—including movie set craftsmen from Cinecittà, the studio complex built by Mussolini—to fashion decoy panzers and gun tubes, as well as other military illusions in the Colli Laziali. In Allied camps, the departure of General Lucas stirred little sentiment beyond the hope, as one British gunner later put it, that his “successor would soon get us out of the mess we were in.” Most licked their wounds, of body and soul, and steeled themselves for battles still ahead. “I’m a little tired,” an Irish Guards sergeant confessed after emerging from the hellish Moletta gullies. “But then, I’m an old man now.”

“Man Is Distinguished from the Beasts”

A
S FISCHFANG
played out at Anzio, another crowded hour ticked away for Monte Cassino and the armies encircling the abbey. Freyberg the New Zealander had become ever more insistent on obliterating the building before launching an attack, and his bellicosity was soon to be inflamed by word that his only child, a young officer in the Grenadier Guards, had gone missing at Anzio. A Royal Artillery gunner said of the looming white edifice, “Somehow it was the thing that was holding up all our lives and keeping us away from home. It became identified in an obsessional way with all the things we detested.”

Willy-nilly bombing of priceless cultural icons was discouraged by custom and forbidden by law. Months earlier the Combined Chiefs had reminded Eisenhower that “consistent with military necessity, the position of the church and of all religious institutions shall be respected and all efforts made to preserve the local archives, historical and classical monuments, and objects of art.” Eisenhower in turn warned his lieutenants in late December that “military necessity” should not be abused as an expedient for military convenience. Alexander’s headquarters in mid-January identified the Monte Cassino abbey and the papal estate at Castel Gandolfo as two preeminent “eccelesiastical centres which it is desired to preserve.” An Allied pamphlet, titled “Preservation of Works of Art in Italy,” included a section
headed “Why Is Italy So Rich in Works of Art?” and the assertion that “man is distinguished from the beasts by his power to reason and to frame abstract hopes and ideas.” Bomber-crew briefing packets included street maps, copied from Baedeker guidebooks, that highlighted historic buildings to avoid. Allied staff officers assigned to repair inadvertent damage were known as Venus Fixers.

Already the Venus Fixers had been busy. Bombs had damaged forty churches in Naples alone; the magnificent bronze doors on a cathedral north of the city were reduced to particles. Errant bombs hit Castel Gandolfo several times in early February, and one such misadventure killed seventeen nuns. But deliberate destruction of Monte Cassino would escalate this “war in a museum,” as Kesselring called the Italian campaign, and within Allied war councils arguments for and against were marshaled with warm intensity.

The unit ordered to capture the massif, the 4th Indian Division, remained keenest to “drench” the hill with bombs. A dubious report from a captured German prisoner, who claimed that paratroopers had put a command post and an aid station within the abbey, led the 4th Indian on February 12 to publish an intelligence summary titled “Violation of Geneva Convention.” Other imagined sightings included those by an Italian civilian who reported thirty machine guns, a 34th Division colonel who saw the flash of field glasses in an abbey window, and U.S. gunners who swore that hostile small-arms fire had streamed from the building. A British newspaper on February 11 printed the incendiary headline “Nazis Turn Monastery into Fort.”

On February 14, two senior American generals, Ira Eaker and Jacob Devers, flew in an observation phase at fifteen hundred feet over Monte Cassino and reported seeing “Germans in the courtyard and also their antennas,” as well as a machine-gun nest fifty yards from the abbey wall. Another American airman, Major General John K. Cannon, pledged, “If you let me use the whole of our bomber force against Cassino, we will whip it out like a dead tooth.” An American artillery commander told
The New York Times,
“I have Catholic gunners in this battery and they’ve asked me for permission to fire on the monastery.” Indeed, the wolf had risen in the heart. A U.S. air wing intelligence analysis declared on February 14, “This monastery has accounted for the lives of upwards of 2,000 boys…. This monastery
must
be destroyed and everyone in it, as there is no one in it but Germans.”

Others passionately disagreed. The French commander, General Juin, pleaded with Clark to spare the building. General Keyes, also a devout Catholic, took his own plane above the abbey on the morning of February 14 and saw “no signs of activity.” Bombing the building would be “an
unnecessary outrage,” he told his diary, particularly because II Corps intelligence detected as many as two thousand refugees now sheltering inside. Moreover, “a partially destroyed edifice is much better for defensive purposes than an untouched one.” Keyes’s irritation at Freyberg grew so intense that Clark rebuked him for “your somewhat belligerent attitude”; the men exchanged peace offerings, with Keyes sending a package of butter, catsup, and Nescafé, and Spadger reciprocating with New Zealand lambs’ tongue, canned oysters, and honey. Still fuming, Keyes wrote, “Why we Americans have to kowtow to the British and by order of our American commanders is beyond me.”

Freyberg was not to be denied, and with Clark at the beachhead he pressed Gruenther for a decision, even though he put the odds of capturing the massif after a bombardment at no better than “fifty-fifty.” If Clark refused to destroy the building, Freyberg added darkly, he would “have to take the responsibility” for New Zealand Corps casualties. Alexander’s new chief of staff, Lieutenant General John H. Harding, also pressured Gruenther. “General Alexander has made his position quite clear,” Harding said in a phone call. “He regrets very much that the monastery should be destroyed, but he sees no other choice.” General Alex “has faith in General Freyberg’s judgment.”

Clark had no such faith. “I now have five corps under my command, only two of which are American, all others of different nationalities,” he wrote in his diary. “I think Napoleon was right when he came to the conclusion that it was better to fight allies than to be one of them.” But he sensed that yet another die had been cast. In a phone call from Alexander, Clark made a last effort to forestall the attack. No clear evidence placed Germans in the abbey. “Previous efforts to bomb a building or a town to prevent its use by the Germans…always failed,” he added. “It would be shameful to destroy the abbey and its treasure,” not to mention any innocent civilians inside. “If the Germans are not in the monastery now, they certainly will be in the rubble after the bombing ends,” Clark said.

Alexander conceded the points, then shrugged them off. “Bricks and mortar, no matter how venerable, cannot be allowed to weigh against human lives,” he argued. Freyberg was “a very important cog in the commonwealth effort. I would be most reluctant to take responsibility for his failing and for his telling his people, ‘I lost five thousand New Zealanders because they wouldn’t let me use air as I wanted.’” Not least, Alexander felt scalding pressure from London. “What are you doing sitting down doing nothing?” the prime minister demanded in a preposterous cable. “Why don’t you use your armour in a great scythe-like movement through the mountains?”

Clark capitulated. If Freyberg were American, he told Alexander, he would deny the request. But “due to the political daintiness” of the circumstances—Spadger in effect commanded a small national army—there was little choice but to procede with the plan now code-named Operation
AVENGER
. In a dictated memo, Clark condemned Alexander for “unduly interfering with Fifth Army activities,” adding, “It is too bad unnecessarily to destroy one of the art treasures of the world.”

The attack would be launched quickly, to exploit a narrow window of fair weather. Freyberg had proposed dropping a single token bomb as a warning to refugees hiding in the abbey. Instead, on Monday night, February 14, Allied gunners lobbed two dozen shells that burst three hundred feet above Monte Cassino, showering the abbey with leaflets.
“Amici italiani, ATTENZIONE!”
they read:

A pleasant morning sun peeped above the Abruzzi peaks on Tuesday, February 15, the harbinger of an Italian spring that surely must come soon. A battered, roofless Volkswagen sped downhill from a decrepit palazzo in Roccaseca, past the ruined castle where the saintly Thomas Aquinas had been born, then left onto Highway 6 in the Liri Valley. Beyond the village of Piedimonte, barely three miles northwest of the gleaming abbey ahead, the car turned onto a farm road and lurched to a stop. A tall, slender man wearing the high-collared tunic of a Wehrmacht lieutenant general climbed from the front seat, scanning the knifeblade ridges for enemies even as he admired the luminous vision crowning Monte Cassino.

For five months Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin had rambled across these hills, swinging his six-foot ashplant, his loping gait said to resemble a sailor’s more than a soldier’s, often chatting up peasants in his passable, lisping Italian. Since October he had commanded XIV Panzer Corps in Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army, responsible first for defending part of the Bernhardt Line and now a fifty-mile stretch of the Gustav Line; no man contributed more to Allied miseries at San Pietro, the Rapido River, and Cassino than Senger. His high forehead, hooked beak, and sunken cheeks gave him the air of a homely ascetic, although his long fingers and aesthete’s mannerisms suggested a man “more French really than Prussian,” as his daughter later claimed. Descended from an ancient family of lesser princes that lost its estates in the Napoleonic Wars and its wealth in the Weimar inflation, Senger had studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar before
finding his calling in the Great War; when his younger brother was killed at Cambrai in 1917, Senger dug for hours through a mass grave in no-man’s-land, determined to give him a more dignified interment. “At last we got the body out, which had lain in the lowest of the three levels,” he later wrote. “I took hold of my brother’s legs and dragged him thus into my car. On the seat beside me sat my lifeless brother.”

In this war he had helped capture Cherbourg, then commanded a panzer division near Stalingrad before serving as Kesselring’s senior liaison to Italian forces in Sicily. Later, as commander of German troops on Corsica and Sardinia, Senger had refused Hitler’s order to shoot turncoat Italian officers, an impertinence only pardoned after he successfully evacuated the entire German garrison. Since taking over the Cassino front he had scrupulously followed orders to keep his troops away from the abbey lest they anger the Vatican; when Abbot Diamare invited Senger to Christmas dinner and mass in the Monte Cassino crypt, he avoided looking out the windows rather than violate the abbey’s neutrality by scanning Allied positions below. German observation posts were dug below the hill crest, where they were better camouflaged anyway.

“The rotten thing is to keep fighting and fighting and to know all along that we have lost this war,” he told an aide, his brushy eyebrows dancing. Now, with his corps at times losing a battalion or more each day, “annihilation was only a matter of time.” Kesselring’s cheery attitude baffled him; after five months in the Italian mountains, Senger insisted that “optimism is the elixir of life for the weak.” He bore the burden—and the stain of serving a National Socialist cause he despised—as best he could, sipping wine in his Roccasecca refuge while listening to evening concerts on his service radio, or sitting with comrades to again watch his favorite movie,
Der Weisse Traum
—The White Dream—about a lovesick Viennese theater manager. He read Aquinas and found cold comfort in the theologian’s teaching that “no man can be held answerable for the misdeeds of those over whom he has no power.” Upon learning of German atrocities in Poland, Senger wrote, “Oh the loneliness when one hears of such things on which one must be silent.”

Now he heard something else. At 9:45
A.M
., as he conferred with grenadier officers in a cylindrical concrete command post near Piedimonte, the drone of bomber engines drew Senger outside. He craned his long neck and shaded his eyes. Tiny cruciforms filled the blue sky three miles above Monte Cassino, their paths etched by milky contrails. Then swarms of bright pellets tumbled toward the abbey, as if heaven itself were throwing silver stones.