World War II Behind Closed Doors (42 page)

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’.
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But whilst the propaganda effect on the Allied troops
below 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 four separate operations in their attempt to take Monte Cassino. The first predated the bombing of the monastery by a month. On 17 January British troops from X Corps had crossed the Garigliano river on the left of the battle front, and were then supported by a crossing of the Rapido river made by the American 36th Division in the centre. Both actions failed. A combination of bad weather, lack of armoured support, difficult terrain and powerful German counter-attacks forced the Allies back. Subsequent fighting in the hills alongside Monte Cassino was just as ineffective, and the attack was called off before the bombing raid. The Allied attackers suffered much greater losses than the German defenders – one American Division, for example, with more than two thousand casualties lost about 80 per cent of its fighting strength.
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The second attempt to capture Monte Cassino, mounted in the days immediately after the bombing, was no better. Units of the Royal Sussex Regiment, the Rajputana Rifles and the Gurkhas all tried to dislodge the Germans, but to little effect. Similarly the third battle, launched on 15 March and involving New Zealand troops among others, was also a failure. The German defenders – notably the 1st Parachute Division, described by British Commander General Alexander as ‘the best Division in the German Army’
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– had held firm. Joseph Klein was a member of this ‘elite’ group ‘formed from the soldiers that had been in Crete and then in Russia’. And he believes that one of the greatest – and
most obvious – advantages the Germans possessed was the power of their defensive positions: ‘I thought: “What nonsense!” How can you send people up this mountain [to attack] — 45 degrees steep! So we often asked ourselves why they chose that way…. They always attacked on the broadest side and on the most impossible terrain’.

The final attempt to capture Monte Cassino was made in May 1944. The delay of nearly two months between the third and fourth assault had allowed the Allies time to benefit from better weather and to prepare a larger and wider military operation against the German line. This time the task of disabling Monte Cassino fell to the 2nd Polish Corps under the command of Lieutenant General Władysław Anders. They were ordered to ‘isolate’ the monastery by attacking the heavily defended mountains alongside. Anders immediately understood that for the Poles this attempt to capture the ‘Monte Cassino heights’ would be more than just a military operation: ‘I realised that the cost in lives must be heavy, but I realised too the importance of the capture of Monte Cassino to the Allied cause, and most of all to that of Poland, for it would answer once and for all the Soviet lie that the Poles did not want to fight the Germans. Victory would give new courage to the resistance movement in Poland and would cover Polish arms with glory. After a moment's reflection I answered that I would undertake the task’.
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On 11 May Polish troops mounted their first attack on Monte Cassino as part of the overall Allied offensive on the Gustav Line. For the men of Anders' army it was, as Wiesław Wolwowicz
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describes it, ‘a christening of fire’. Wolwowicz, then a twenty-two-year-old junior officer in the 16th Lwów Rifle Battalion, had come on a typically lengthy and circuitous journey to be here in Italy. In the autumn of 1939 he had been captured by the Soviets just outside Lwów while trying to escape westwards to join the Polish Army. After interrogation by the NKVD in the notorious Brigidki prison in Lwów he was taken by train to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1940 where he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and confined in a camp in the Ural Mountains. After some
months cutting trees in the forest as a forced labourer, he was released following the German invasion of the Soviet Union and joined Anders's army. He subsequently left the Soviet Union as part of the II Polish Corps and started training first in Iraq and then in Palestine. Now he listened as ‘thousands of guns started shelling Monte Cassino’ and the first wave of Polish soldiers climbed the mountains to attack: ‘Monte Cassino is known as a very difficult battle’, Wolwowicz says. ‘Yes, it's true. Can you imagine rocks? When the German army started shelling us there was no green grass, there were no bushes, there was just rocks and rubble…. It wasn't easy…. When the guns were shelling the rocks, the rocks used to break up’. The Poles moved forward in the darkness, but the lack of cover and the murderous German fire from above wreaked havoc on the advancing troops. Still they pressed on, reaching the ridge on top of the mountain adjacent to Monte Cassino, where they fought the Germans hand-to-hand.

Tomasz Piesakowski
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learnt of the carnage in the mountains around Cassino from his position commanding a mortar troop behind the lines. Like Wolwowicz, he came from eastern Poland, now claimed by Stalin as Soviet territory, and had previously been imprisoned in the Soviet Union. He describes the battle as a ‘hell on earth’ as the Poles tried to seize the high ground from the Germans. ‘When [after the battle] I went to the cemetery – the provisional cemetery – to find out where the graves of my friends were, I couldn't believe my eyes! So many graves were there!’

The Poles were unable to hold the territory they had captured, and Anders was forced to order his men back. Just as before, the defenders of Monte Cassino – by now fewer than a thousand of them – had proved too strong. And Anders was clear why the attack had failed: ‘Enemy reserves would suddenly emerge from concealment in caves to make a series of powerful counter-attacks which were supported by accurate fire from guns…it soon became clear that it was easier to capture some objectives than to hold them’.
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But even though the initial attack had failed, the Poles had earned the respect of their opponents. ‘They were brave soldiers’, says German parachutist Joseph Klein. ‘They were the bravest of
them all, in fact. But it was more like an inner drive that went almost to the level of fanaticism…. They looked at death but marched ahead nevertheless, which nobody else did…. This was a devastating thing – the order and sense of duty the Poles had. The thinking that: “We have to get through. We have to show the Allied forces that we are worthy of belonging to them. We must make the breakthrough”…. We often couldn't believe it’.

On 16 May the Poles mounted another attack, and this time Wiesław Wolwowicz and his unit moved forward into battle: ‘There were many people who died, many wounded. Being in charge of a unit I tried to help them as much as I could…. Being a commander you don't really think much about danger. In fact, you do think about it at the back of your mind, but you don't believe that you will be wounded or you will die. But in practice, of course, it's not always the case’.

Conditions on the battlefield were appalling. Wolwowicz could ‘smell the decomposing bodies of our soldiers, of the animals in the sun. All the bodies of the dead soldiers were swollen and they looked almost like barrels. We could smell the terrible, terrible smell of dead bodies. You could smell this smell later on for a long time afterwards. It was like a nightmare haunting you…the smell coming from the dead bodies of the soldiers lying in the open sun’.

This time the Poles managed to hold their forward positions against a German force that – though still resisting fiercely – was now considerably depleted. Elsewhere on the front, Allied troops had succeeded in advancing through the Liri valley, which meant that the Allies now had the opportunity to skirt around Monte Cassino, and by 17 May the mountain was all but encircled. As a consequence, the German commander Field Marshal Kesselring ordered the 1st Parachute Division to withdraw.

The remaining German soldiers on Monte Cassino – those who were too sick or too badly wounded to evacuate – surrendered to the Poles on the morning of the 18th. Just before ten o'clock Anders's men raised a makeshift red and white Polish flag over the ruins of the monastery: it was a famous victory. But a victory won at massive cost. Several thousand Poles were killed or wounded in
the battle for Monte Cassino. And the majority of these Poles – like the majority of the soldiers in Anders's army – came from the very areas of eastern Poland that Stalin now claimed as his own.

As they fought and died in the rocky outcrops and gorges of the heights of Monte Cassino, these Poles hoped that their sacrifice would help Poland to become a free and independent land. As it turned out – tragically – they were mistaken.

THE SECOND FRONT IS LAUNCHED AT LAST

At half past seven in the morning on 6 June 1944, tanks of the British cavalry regiment the 13th/18th Hussars pushed forward over the sandy beach of Ouistreham in Normandy. They were part of an invasion force of over 160,000 Allied troops targeting five main beaches, codenamed Utah, Omaha, Juno, Gold and Sword. This was D-Day – the first opposed amphibious landing in strength on the coast of France for nearly a thousand years. It was also the start of the second front that Stalin had been calling for since the summer of 1941 – something he believed Roosevelt had promised would be mounted two years earlier.

‘We kept going in and in, and all of a sudden we hear these pings on the steel-hulled landing craft’, says Sid Salomon,
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a member of the US Rangers who took part in the attack on Omaha beach, where the Allies faced the toughest resistance. ‘And the guy said: “The Germans are firing at us”. We could see them in the distance up on top of the cliffs. Something landed in the water and the concussion hit and it flipped me over and I heard somebody yell: “Keep moving! Keep moving! …I reached over and grabbed him by the jacket … pulled him out from the surf. And just then a mortar shell landed behind me – knocked me flat on my face and I thought: “What the hell! I must be dead”…. And there were guys lying on the beach dead. Shells hitting it, machine gun fire ripping across it, an LST off to our right – they got a dead hit as they were unloading. These guys were coming down and just blew that sucker right out of the water. Hell of a sight. Awful’.

But on the other beaches the landings went more smoothly. ‘I can remember talking it over with a fellow company commander and reckoning our chances of getting across the beach alive were going to be pretty small’, says Peter Martin,
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then a major with the Cheshire Regiment. ‘But in fact everything by that time had quietened down and we weren't under fire of any sort… and it was one of those very rare occasions in war when the plan goes absolutely according to plan’.

As soldiers of the Western Allies battled to establish a foothold in Normandy, the Red Army prepared to launch a massive attack on German Army Group Centre in an attempt to recapture Minsk and push the Wehrmacht back out of the Soviet Union. This operation, which had been agreed at Tehran, dwarfed D-Day in scale. The Germans had 30 divisions in the West to face the Allied onslaught following D-Day, but concentrated 165 divisions against the Red Army in the East. Over 2 million Red Army soldiers would take part in the June offensive, codenamed by Stalin Operation Bagration' after the Georgian military hero who had fought against Napoleon.

‘For Bagration we were preparing very carefully’, says Veniamin Fyodorov,
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then a twenty-year-old soldier with the Soviet 77th Guards infantry regiment. ‘Whatever resources the Soviet Union had were concentrated in this direction. Big numbers of artillery, tanks and ammunition. And big numbers of infantry’. On 22 June 1944 (the third anniversary of the German invasion) Fyodorov watched the initial bombardment from his own side with a sense of awe: ‘When you look ahead, you see bits of earth flying up into the air and you see explosions. As if you light a match. Flashes, flashes. One flash, another flash. And bits of land [are thrown in the air]. After the bombardment, planes came, flying low. We felt more cheerful because we had a lot of military equipment’.

For the Germans, on the other hand, Operation Bagration marked the lowest point in their military fortunes so far – lower even than Stalingrad in terms of military losses. Seventeen divisions were destroyed completely, with another fifty enduring losses of 50 per cent. And it was Hitler who was largely to blame for this
defeat. No longer did he trust his generals to take the initiative on the battlefield as he had done in the early days of the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Now he gave direct tactical orders to the commanders of the 9th Army who faced Operation Bagration – and increasingly these orders seemed disconnected from the realities of modern warfare. One of Hitler's most debilitating instructions, for example, was to establish
Feste Plätze
(Fortified Places) that would act as fortresses behind the lines when the Red Army moved forward.

On the eve of Bagration General Jordan, commander of the 9th Army, wrote these words: ‘…The Army believes that even under the present conditions, it would be possible to stop the enemy offensive, but not under the present directives which require an absolutely rigid defence…. The Army considers the orders establishing
“Feste Plätze”
particularly dangerous. The army looks ahead to the coming battle with bitterness, knowing that it is bound by order to tactical measures which it cannot in good conscience accept as correct and which in our earlier victorious campaigns were the cause of the enemy defeats’.
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