The Day of Battle (93 page)

In danger of encirclement from the north and west, German defenders began slipping away—although only after Kesselring personally ordered the recalcitrant General Heidrich to fall back to the Hitler Line: the 1st Parachute Division had become as possessive of Cassino as a jealous husband of his bride. Across the hill in Cassino town, British loudspeakers blared, “To fight on is senseless…. Cassino is lost to Germany.” From the Baron’s Palace and the Continental Hotel, shadows darted up over Hangman’s Hill. Fearful of vengeful Poles, a few surrendered by walking
hands-high to the Crypt or up Highway 6, where the British 78th Division bagged eighty paratroopers creeping to the rear. By three
A.M
. on May 18, the town was empty of living Germans.

The struggle for the high ground behind the abbey ended with the dawn. At seven
A.M
., Point 593 finally fell for good. Two hours later a Polish lieutenant from the 12th Podolski Lancers led a six-man patrol up a slope carpeted with poppies and corpses, among them Poles and Germans wrapped in death embraces. Across the ruined parking lot the Lancers scuffed, past charred debris and a cracked church bell. A sergeant climbed on his comrades’ shoulders to scale the broken wall, then helped hoist the rest inside. Fresco fragments and shards of marble statuary crunched beneath their boots. They found two German orderlies attending sixteen badly wounded paratroopers, including several lying in St. Benedict’s candlelit crypt.

Just before ten
A.M
. the lancers’ regimental pennant, fashioned from a Red Cross flag and a blue handkerchief, rose on a staff above Monte Cassino’s western wall. A bugler played the “Hejna
Mariacki,” a medieval military call once used to signal the opening of Kraków’s gates. Then the red-and-white Polish flag rose against the midday sky. Anders’s soldiers wept.

At 11:30
A.M
. British signalers broadcast a single code word—
WYE
—to proclaim Cassino’s fall. Leese arrived for tea in the Crypt, then toasted Anders with champagne. Polish casualties for the week exceeded 3,700, including 860 killed; 900 unburied German dead were counted. Alexander cabled Churchill: “Capture of Cassino means a great deal to me and both my armies.”

For the first time in five months, men in the town stood erect during daylight. They discovered roses blooming near the jail and an undamaged statue of the Virgin in a stand of splintered trees; a panzer was found parked in the Continental lobby. Grenadier Guardsmen emerged from Jane, Helen, Mary, and other dank hovels, then marched from the town toward Shit Corner for a respite. Some 2,500 British and South African engineers stood ready to clear Highway 6 only to find the drifted rubble so dense that just a few hundred could get close to the roadbed; to bulldoze a one-mile stretch would take fifty-two hours.

In the abbey itself, further investigation brought further horrors: children killed in the February bombing; the bones of a nineteenth-century cardinal, robbed of his ring and pectoral cross, dumped in a garden tub; corpses tucked into large drawers used to store vestments. “The whole effect,” one Venus Fixer reported, “is like that of a Mesopotamian tell.” Polish, British, and Indian soldiers wandered about, scribbling graffiti and collecting souvenirs, including a carved angel’s head yanked from a choir
stall. Among German sketches found in the rubble was a portrait of Frau Göring and a river scene titled “On the Lovely Banks of the Rhine.” A skillful cartoonist had also drawn a cigar-smoking Churchill standing on the Cassino plain while a German paratrooper straddled the abbey ruins. The caption read
“Denk’ste”
—“Think it over.”

A solitary American fighter pilot flew low over the abbey and tossed a bouquet of roses from the cockpit. Gun flashes limned the northern horizon, a reminder that for most the war had moved on. “Don’t expect normal letters from me because I won’t be normal for some time,” Lance Corporal Walter Robson of the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment wrote his wife on May 18.

“We’ve been Stuka’d, mortared, shelled, machine-gunned, sniped, and although we’ve taken Cassino, the monastery, none of us feel any elation,” Robson added. “The losses sadden and frighten us…. When, when, when is this insanity going to stop?”

General von Senger, freshly bemedaled, had returned from his month’s leave on May 17 to find Vietinghoff, the bombed-out Tenth Army commander, squatting in his command post near Frosinone, thirty miles up the valley from Cassino. Senger also found the Gustav Line ruptured, his XIV Panzer Corps bisected, and German intelligence uncertain where on the Petrella Massif the French irregulars had gone. Vietinghoff pronounced the XIV Corps predicament “frightful.” “For the first time in nine months the corps had been breached,” Senger later wrote. Moreover, the Hitler Line had been assigned a new name to forestall embarrassment to the Führer in the event that it too failed: the Senger Line.

That line by any name must be held, particularly the seventeen-mile western stretch from Terracina on the Tyrrhenian coast to the hill town of Pico, where the Auruncis spilled into the Liri Valley. Here Fifth Army with its phantom
goumiers
now posed the greatest threat. “It was left to me,” Senger added, “to prevent the annihilation of the corps.”

The task was formidable. Longer days and better weather made the German rear ever more vulnerable to enemy aircraft, including the little spotter planes that adjusted Allied long-range artillery. “Constant, unremitting Allied fighter-bomber activity makes movement or troop deployment almost impossible,” the Tenth Army war diary reported on May 18. So many horses had been killed that equipment had to be manhandled to the rear or abandoned. The fifty-nine German battalions on the southern front now averaged under 250 soldiers each; the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division, stalwarts of Troina and other southern battlegrounds, on May 20 reported only 405 men fit to fight.

Italian supply-truck drivers were now deserting en bloc despite mass executions for “cowardice in the face of the enemy”; round-trip convoys to northern Italy sometimes took up to three weeks. Artillery barrages severed phone lines, forcing German commanders to use radios, which were vulnerable to eavesdropping and to finicky reception in the mountains. “I demand a clear picture,” Kesselring told Tenth Army in a peevish message, but there was no clear picture to be had: even Ultra cryptologists were baffled by the babel from German units.

In truth, Kesselring had been outgeneraled. Slow to recognize the Aurunci threat on his right, he also was slow to realize that another Allied amphibious landing was but a ruse, and slow to release his reserves. On May 14, Kesselring had dispatched the first of three strategic reserve divisions, the 26th Panzer, but the seventy-mile journey from the outskirts of Rome took so long that the unit’s tanks could not fight cohesively until May 19, too late to caulk the Gustav Line. On that day, Kesselring also ordered Fourteenth Army to transfer the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division—defender of San Pietro six months earlier—from the Anzio beachhead to Tenth Army’s right wing. Petulant delays by General von Mackensen, the Fourteenth Army commander, further damaged efforts to tighten the Hitler Line, as the Allies continued to call it. Mobile divisions such as the 15th and 90th Panzer Grenadiers were broken into penny packets, with battalions scattered about and eventually defeated in detail. The Führer was even forced to strip the equivalent of three divisions from Hungary, Croatia, and Denmark for defenses in Italy.

As for Kesselring, he was reduced to fulminating against impudent subordinates while urging his troops to resist “the enemy’s major offensive against the cultural center of Europe.” Few found such exhortations inspiriting. “You have no idea how hard this retreat is, or how terrible,” a German reconnaissance commander wrote his wife after Cassino fell. “My heart bleeds when I look at my beautiful battalion…. See you soon, I hope, in better days.”

Better days were difficult to see from either side of the firing line. A Canadian described
DIADEM
as a thousand individual battles erupting “like spontaneous fires exploding in a rag factory,” and the rags continued to blaze. General Leese now had three corps with some twenty thousand vehicles crammed along a six-mile front in a narrow valley flanked by high hills and admirably suited to ambush and delay. Bucolic at a distance—one Canadian described an Italian village as “a vaporous fantasy on its beehive hill, topped by a grim, crenellated tower”—the Liri proved neither pastoral nor an easy avenue to Rome. Most trees had already been reduced to flinders by bombs and artillery shells. Retreating Germans fired the ricks
and farmhouses, slaughtered the cattle, and murdered more than a few civilians. “German prisoners made to clear their own minefields,” a Guards officer recorded. “Half a dozen blown to blazes.”

A Kiwi tanker negotiating a hillside vineyard described “the Shermans pitching like destroyers in and out of the ditches that parallel every row, men sitting in front with heavy wire-cutters to hack a passage.” Brick culverts under the side roads collapsed beneath the weight of thirty-ton tanks, and traffic jams soon rivaled those that had bedeviled Eighth Army at Alamein: one brigade trying to move toward the sound of the guns took eighteen hours to travel thirteen miles. A Canadian general complained that Highway 6 was “jammed by trucks nose to arse.”

If the Hitler Line lacked natural impediments like the Rapido River and Monte Cassino, it boasted a fortification belt half a mile wide that had been under construction by a five-thousand-man labor force since December. The “medley of fieldworks” included mines, antitank ditches, double-apron barbed wire, and nearly three thousand firing positions. Panther tank turrets, sporting a high-velocity 75mm gun that was among the war’s cruelest, had been mounted on brick plinths. An initial Eighth Army probe on May 19 ended with thirteen Canadian tanks in flames. Across the Auruncis, heavy fire also demolished five U.S. Shermans, including one named
Bonnie Gay
that burned so furiously that “the only trace of the crew were fillings of the teeth,” a tank battalion history recorded.

“Head wounds are many and serious. Most occur in tank crews when tanks take a direct hit,” wrote Klaus H. Huebner, a medical officer whose 88th Division battalion aid station occupied a village bakery. “On examination their skulls feel like shattered egg shells…. Our morgue in the backyard is soon full.” In his diary Huebner added, “We are always on the bottom, and the Krauts always on top. The terrain is constantly in the enemy’s favor.”

There was nothing for it but to soldier on. Sergeants doled out rum rations in enamel cups after breakfast and sent their men off to commit mayhem. Or to have it committed upon them. A Tommy waiting at a field hospital to have both legs amputated murmured, “I couldn’t run a race, but I’ve got plenty of fight left in me, and I’m going to live.” He died after surgery. A British captain noted the “melancholy sight of a carpenter fashioning crosses for our dead.” When an American tank commander was shot through the heart by a sniper suspected of sheltering among a clutch of surrendering Germans, a company commander ordered, “Do not take any more prisoners.”

In fact, hordes were taken, by ferocious Poles and
goumiers
as well as by aroused Yanks. On average a thousand German prisoners marched into
Allied cages each day, and the pathetic condition of many heartened their captors. “The older men are a weird and wonderful collection,” an interrogation report noted on May 22. “It would appear that the authorities had firmly closed their eyes to such things as a missing toe, lack of an eye, and other slight infirmities, not to mention age.” Still, the days of underestimating German obduracy were long gone. “One of my aid men brings in a wounded German,” the surgeon Huebner recorded. “He is smoking a cigarette. As he exhales, smoke pours out of the holes in his chest.”

As the second week of the Allied offensive slid past, Alexander studied dispatches from the front with the intensity of a seer hunched over entrails. Each day he drove north from Caserta to see for himself, eyebrows and red hat floured with dust as he peered through field glasses into the middle distance. On the far left the U.S. II Corps on May 20 had captured Fondi, where Roman legions had stopped Hannibal during the First Punic War. Keyes’s legions now threatened the port of Terracina at the southern lip of the Pontine Marshes. On the far right, Leese continued to batter the valley fortifications, dumping eight hundred artillery shells per minute on German strongpoints. In the center, French gunners caught exposed panzer grenadiers near Esperia, killing so many that bulldozers were needed to shovel away the carcasses; Senger complained that his battalions were “bleeding to death.” After cutting Highway 82 the
goumiers
continued their uplands tramp, and Juin’s legions on May 21 seized a foothold in the vital crossroads town of Pico, provoking ferocious German counterattacks with Tiger tanks.

From west to east the Hitler Line was crumbling.
We’ve got them,
Juin had exclaimed, and it seemed he might be right. Much fighting remained: the Germans—or, rather, ten thousand Italian laborers—had begun yet another string of fortifications below Rome, the Caesar Line. But Kesselring had been forced to transfer divisions from Anzio to check Allied momentum on the southern front. “The enemy has denuded the forces investing the beachhead of the bulk of their reserves,” AFHQ intelligence reported on May 22. “The risk is so great as to be surprising.”