The Day of Battle (91 page)

H-hour was fixed for eleven
P.M
. on May 11, half an hour before moon-rise. The day dawned gray and damp enough to lay the dust, then faired in the afternoon. A grizzled French spahi told a young American liaison officer, “I do not know where my son is tonight, and your father does not know where his son is. So tonight we will be father and son.” The Frenchman had ten days to live. Shelling on both sides dwindled to a mutter at last light, then ceased entirely, yielding to what Alexander called “a strange, impressive silence.” Stars threw down their silver spears. “New boys with fear and nerves and anxiety hidden under quick smiles,” a Canadian chaplain wrote. “It is the hardest thing to watch without breaking into tears.”

Shaking Stars from the Heavens

T
HE
BBC pips had not finished signaling the top of the hour at eleven
P.M
. on Thursday, May 11, when gusts of white flame erupted in a thirty-mile crescent across the hills of central Italy. Light leaped from two thousand gun pits, laving the cannoneers as they danced bare-chested at their breechblocks, shoving home another shell, and another, and another. Ruby tongues licked from the muzzles, as drifting smoke rings lassoed the constellations and concussion ghosts chased one another through the night. “It seemed it must shake the very stars out of the heavens,” a Black Watch soldier wrote.

Men peered from their trenches or crowded into farmhouse doorways to watch the spectacle, their faces reddened in the glow and their helmets jarred by the percussive shock. “Rome, then home!” they bellowed. Nightingales had sung in the silence before the cannonade; now they sang louder but to small effect. “The roar of the guns is so deafening that you can shout at the man next to you and still not be heard,” a medical officer in the 88th Division wrote. “Sheets of flame spring behind every bush. The hills to our north are spattered with phosphorus bursts that illuminate the entire horizon.” Above the abbey and Cassino town, scores of German flares added their own sibilant brilliance, tiny red and silver supernovas that stretched the shadows. “The sky,” a Royal Hampshire account noted, “was full of noises.”

Gunners draped wet rags over their sizzling barrels or poured cans of water down the muzzles, then reloaded. Fifth Army alone would fire 174,000 shells in the first twenty-four hours of
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, requital for months of peninsular misery. “I felt as if a bridge of iron was being erected overhead, and wondered how it was that shells did not collide,” a Polish corporal in the 3rd Carpathian Division reported. As the barrage continued, Alexander sent Churchill a prearranged confirmation that the offensive had begun: “Zip, repeat, zip.”

Rome, then home.
At midnight on the Allied right, the Eighth Army assault battalions shook out and surged forward through the vibrating air like wasps from an angry hive. Where the Americans and then the New Zealand Corps had attacked enemy strongpoints months before, Eighth Army would also attack but with twice the strength and more: two Polish divisions up Monte Cassino rather than just the 4th Indian, two British divisions across the Rapido—with two more to follow, and then the entire Canadian Corps—rather than just the U.S. 36th Division. Shell fire scythed the enemy redoubts. “We were confident,” a British platoon commander said, “that no Germans could possibly outlive such a devastating bombardment.”

The Poles found otherwise. “Soldiers! The moment for battle has arrived,” General Anders told his men. “We have long awaited the moment for revenge and retribution over our hereditary enemy.” Troops surged up Snakeshead Ridge toward Point 593, that scabrous knuckle, following trails marked with painted phosphorescent arrows. Within five hundred yards they were burrowing beneath the bodies of dead comrades, seeking cover from murderous machine-gun and mortar fire. By mischance, the hereditary enemy had chosen the night of May 11 to relieve defenders behind Monte Cassino with fresh troops: the hillside garrison was nearly double its normal strength. Nine German battalions opposed the Poles.

“Many of us had lost our exact bearings and there was a great deal of confusion,” a Polish platoon leader reported. To keep secret the presence of the Polish corps at Cassino, Leese had refused to let Anders reconnoiter the terrain. Hand-to-hand fighting clattered across the slopes in what Anders called “a collection of small epics.” The 5th Kresowa Division seized Phantom Ridge, a mile northwest of the abbey, but took a savage pounding on the exposed hogback. A 3rd Carpathian battalion captured Point 593 but an attack on nearby Point 569 collapsed after Polish artillery fire—hampered by a shortage of observation posts—lifted too quickly and riflemen were slaughtered in a saddle below the hill. When Polish sappers later balked at clearing a minefield, a Carpathian commander barked over the radio, “If they do not obey orders, shoot them.” They obeyed: of twenty engineers in one minesweeping detail, eighteen would be killed or wounded. “You don’t know how dreadful death can be,” a dying Pole told his comrades. “Now I shall have to miss the rest of the battle.”

At dawn, the rising sun fired the hilltops as if they had been dipped in copper. All morning and past the meridian the killing continued. German snipers used the light to lethal advantage, picking off Poles “like sitting birds.” Anders had been given sixteen flamethrowers but little instruction in how to use them; most were ruined by German artillery and mortar fire,
including two that burst into flame. “I was working on my knees. I was smeared all over with blood,” a Polish surgeon reported. “A corporal came and stood among the wounded…. Through his torn tunic I saw a wound the size of two hands, the shoulder-bone bared.” The corporal told him, “I shan’t let you evacuate me until I’ve thrown all my grenades.”

Yet even Polish valor could not win through. Hundreds of dead men sprawled among the poppies and wild irises. By four
P.M
. on Friday, May 12, all momentum had seeped away. With his assault battalions depleted by half, Anders ordered both divisions back to their starting lines. The attack, one Polish writer noted, “was really no more than a very costly reconnaissance.”

A British officer who arrived at General Leese’s command post late in the afternoon found him rambling through a field. As the officer began to deliver the bad news—attack repulsed, fearsome Polish losses—Leese held up a huge hand. “Let’s pick some cornflowers,” he said. They picked until their arms were laden with blue-headed stalks, then Leese said, “Right! Now tell me about the casualties.”

Upon driving to the Polish II Corps headquarters, Leese found the usually elegant Anders slumped in his caravan, disheveled and in need of a shave. His eyes red, his face gray, the Polish commander turned and asked, “What do we do now?”

What, indeed? If Eighth Army’s right wing had failed, the left wing was hardly capering toward Rome. Along the Rapido, the 8th Indian Division had been assigned to cross the river and capture Sant’Angelo, the dolorous village that had so bedeviled the 36th Division in January. As the barrage lifted early Friday morning, vapors from the river swallowed the rising moon. Khaki-drill columns wended through the fens, following white tape and hooded hurricane lanterns to the east bank. Vehicles crept forward, hauling boats or towing antitank guns. From upstream, a rude clanking carried on the night: a squad of 6th Lancers, crouching in defilade, banged angle iron against pieces of rail track as a deception to draw fire.

Fire they drew, but so did the rest of the bridgehead. Assault troops splashed and paddled across the Rapido only to trip both antipersonnel mines left five months earlier by the Yanks and smoke canisters emplaced by German gunners as aiming stakes. Within minutes smoke, mist, and cordite billowed through the bottoms “like a yellow London fog,” in Leese’s phrase. Visibility dropped to two feet.

Men stumped about in flame-stabbed confusion, pitching into ditches and walking in circles. British gunners fired Bofors tracers overhead to show the azimuth of liberation, but “in the mist the shells quickly dimmed
and were lost to sight,” a reporter observed. Royal Fusiliers reached the west bank above Sant’Angelo with few casualties, each soldier clinging to the bayonet scabbard of the man ahead. But now the ground between river and village was covered by a vermilion loom of enemy bullets, and stick grenades showered the bottoms from the Sant’Angelo bluffs. “Oh, God, don’t let me die yet,” Fusilier F. R. Beacham pleaded. “I promise that I will always be good if you let me live.” Coming upon a mortally wounded comrade, Beacham lifted a water bottle to his lips. “Thanks a lot, mate,” the man said, then passed over.

Twelve of sixteen Gurkha boats sank or floated away. The four surviving craft ferried men through the small hours, with much shouting above the din from bank to bank. Farther upstream, all forty boats manned by a brigade of the British 4th Infantry Division were soon gone. Drowned men drifted on the dark current that had drowned so many before.

By midday, no battalion in either the 8th Indian or the 4th Infantry had gained more than five hundred yards of an intended two thousand. Barely half of Leese’s objectives had been secured on the left, none on the right. Snipers whittled away the British as they did the Poles. After a major in the Derbyshire Yeomanry fell dead with a bullet in the brain, a subordinate offered a terse elegy: “He was an autocratic man but a good leader, and we came to regret his death.” A Fusilier who spent May 12 facedown in a ditch listening to the “sough and whiffle” of shells overhead later noted, “The day passed ever so slowly.”

Yet the enemy had missed his main chance. The absence of Vietinghoff, Westphal, Senger, Baade, and others impaired German dexterity; so did 350 tons of Allied bombs that battered Kesselring’s command post and demolished the Tenth Army headquarters near Avezzano, with “an unsteadying effect upon the occupants.” Confusion, error, fear—the usual frictions—played hob on the far side of the hill, and the crushing counterattack that might have crippled
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never took shape.

Three bridges, dubbed Cardiff, Oxford, and Plymouth, had been planned for the Rapido near Sant’Angelo. Cardiff was abandoned, but engineers carved ramps and filled ditches under scorching fire to throw a small span across at Oxford before nine
A.M
. on Friday. Two hours later and a thousand yards downstream, a pair of Sherman tanks muscled a one-hundred-foot Bailey bridge over the stream at Plymouth. Canadian tanks pelted for the far shore, “camouflaged with green boughs and looking like a harvest festival.”

Upstream between Sant’Angelo and Cassino town, dead and dying engineers shored the riverbank. But by first light on Saturday, May 13, another span—Amazon—slid into place. A pipe major crossed, skirling, then fell
mortally wounded. “Cries for help from the wounded…could be heard inside the tanks even though the crews were wearing headphones,” according to a 6th Armoured Division account. The tanks bulled ahead, riflemen clinging to their hulls with one hand and shooting with the other. Every so often the smoke and marsh mist parted to allow glimpses of the abbey, floating toward heaven.

Gurkhas twice surged into Sant’Angelo on Friday, and twice machine gunners embedded in the rubble threw them back. Cairn by cairn, cellar by cellar, attackers rooted out defenders with grenades and curved kukri knives. A pair of Canadian tanks flanked the village, gunning down those who sought to slip away. By three
P.M
. Saturday, resistance had ended but for the odd sniper, at a cost of 170 Gurkha casualties. White dust floured the quick and the dead alike.

Putrefying corpses were soaked in gasoline and set ablaze, then shoved into a trench. Some captured Germans were found to have wounds dressed with paper: enemy medics had run short of bandages. “This is real war,” a squadron commander in the 17th Battalion of the 21st Lancers scribbled in his notebook, “and makes Africa seem a picnic.” A Royal Artillery gunner in the 78th Division studied the consequences of his fall of shot: splintered rifles, smashed field glasses, dead Germans. “This is the terrifying thing about war,” he wrote. “When I saw what I had achieved, I had no regrets at all.”

They pushed on, across the shot-torn fields, edging toward the mouth of the Liri Valley, where objectives had been code-named after famous Midlands hunts. A Canadian in the 48th Highlanders described being snagged by barbed wire with another soldier: “He was thrashing and fighting with the wire like a man gone insane. The bullets started socking into him, and he jerked and kicked with each new hit. Then he crumpled beside me. Nothing was very bad in the war after that.”

Two secure bridgeheads merged to form a shallow purchase across the Rapido. Six more bridges opened, and thousands of smoke shells kept Monte Cassino swaddled in white. But unless the abbey and adjacent hills fell, German batteries threatened to flay anyone pushing up Highway 6 through the valley. “Flames of Jerry guns almost beautiful at dusk,” a Guards officer observed. “Spitting crimson, amber and opal.”

In four days Eighth Army would advance just four miles, at a cost of more than four thousand casualties—a man down every five feet. Still, Leese took satisfaction where he could, even as he pondered how to convert his fragile bridgehead into the battle of annihilation that Alexander coveted.

“Mark Clark has laid 4–1 against our crossing the Rapido,” Leese wrote. “As they say at a private school, ‘Sucks to him.’”

Clark had troubles enough without British maledictions. Fifteen miles downstream from Cassino, on the far left of the Allied line, Geoffrey Keyes’s II Corps—composed of the 85th and 88th Divisions—had used its foothold across the Garigliano to push forward from Minturno in
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’s early hours. Soldiers nervously worked their rifle bolts as they strode ahead, blankets and raincoats tied to their combat packs. Each man wore white adhesive strips or squares of white cloth on the back of his helmet and uniform sleeves to prevent fratricide; platoon leaders added extra white-tape chevrons to make themselves more recognizable to their men. Officers gobbled Benzedrine tablets. “Rome, Rome,” a lieutenant in the 88th Division chanted, “who gets Rome?”