The breakthrough on the Gari

At dawn on 13 May 1944, at about five o’clock, British engineers bolted the last sections of a steel Bailey bridge across the River Gari, a few kilometres south of the town of Cassino. The crossing, code-named “Amazon”, had been built throughout the night under incessant fire from German artillery and mortars, and many of the men who built it did not live to see it finished. A few hours later tanks began to roll across. The two infantry bridgeheads that had been clinging to the western bank of the river since the night of 11/12 May were turned into a springboard for an advance deep into the Liri valley.

That same day, a dozen or so kilometres further south in the Aurunci Mountains, units of the French Expeditionary Corps took the summit of Monte Maio (Majo) and tore open the Gustav Line in the sector the Germans considered the least accessible. 13 May was therefore the day on which the fourth battle of Monte Cassino, begun two days earlier, ceased to be a series of bloody assaults without result and began to yield a breakthrough – though not where Polish memory later followed its course, on the hills around the monastery.

The river that stopped two offensives

The Gari – as the locals call the lower stretch of the Rapido between Cassino and its confluence with the Liri, with which it forms the Garigliano – is not a wide river, but in May 1944 it was a dozen or so metres across, with a swift current, steep, sodden banks and a depth that ruled out fording. Beyond it opened the Liri valley, the only ground on this stretch of the front over which large masses of tanks could pass, and beyond that Highway 6 (the Via Casilina) leading to Rome. The Germans knew this perfectly well: the valley was closed off by minefields, wire, bunkers and firing positions dug into the western bank, and the whole plain was overlooked from the Monte Cassino massif on the right and from the Aurunci Mountains on the left.

The river had already stopped the Allies once. On the night of 20/21 January 1944 the American 36th Infantry Division had tried to force the Gari near Sant’Angelo and suffered a defeat that went down in history as the Rapido crossing: in two days the regiments of the Texas division lost nearly 1,700 men and failed to hold any bridgehead. In the weeks that followed the weight of the fighting shifted to the hills and the ruins of the town – from the destruction of the abbey in February to the third battle in March – but the Liri valley remained shut.

The spring plan of General Harold Alexander, commander of 15th Army Group, reversed that logic. Instead of yet another assault on a single point, Operation Diadem provided for a simultaneous attack along the whole front from Cassino to the sea. The greater part of Oliver Leese’s British Eighth Army was secretly moved from the Adriatic to Cassino. At its centre stood General Sidney Kirkman’s British XIII Corps, which was given the task of forcing the Gari: on the right, nearer Cassino, the British 4th Infantry Division (General Dudley Ward); on the left, opposite the village of Sant’Angelo in Theodice, the 8th Indian Infantry Division (General Dudley Russell). Both were supported by the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade, and the British 78th Infantry Division and 6th Armoured Division waited in corps reserve. To the right of the British, General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps was to take the heights above the monastery, and to the left, already in the zone of General Mark Clark’s American Fifth Army, the French and Americans were to attack from the bridgehead over the Garigliano.

The night of 11/12 May

At 11 p.m. on 11 May more than 1,600 guns of the two armies opened fire. A quarter of an hour later the infantry of the 4th Division and the 8th Indian Division began launching their assault boats. The plan was for the crossing to be made in darkness, under cover of fire and artificial fog; in practice thick mist and the smoke of the shells cut visibility to a few metres, the current swept the boats away, some capsized or were holed, and companies lost their bearings and landed in the wrong places. German machine guns fired blind along the river, and the minefields on the western bank took their toll.

Even so, by morning both divisions had several battalions on the far bank. The bridgeheads were shallow, however – in places only a few hundred metres deep – and without tanks could not beat off German counter-attacks. Everything depended on bridges. In the Indian sector the first crossings were put up as early as 12 May. One of them was the product of the ingenuity of a Canadian officer, Captain Tony Kingsmill of the Royal Canadian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, attached to the Calgary tank regiment: a ready-assembled, thirty-metre Bailey bridge was laid on top of a turretless Sherman, which drove into the river, while a second tank pushed the span over to the far bank. By about 10 a.m. on 12 May the bridge was ready for use; Kingsmill, wounded in the back, later received the Military Cross, and the Calgary tanks drove into the Indian bridgehead and moved against the German strongpoints.

The Amazon bridge

In the 4th Division’s sector, nearer Cassino, things were worse. The infantry of the brigades that had crossed during the night lay in shallow scrapes a few hundred metres from the river, pinned down by fire from both directions – from the buildings in front of them and from Monastery Hill behind them. On 12 May German counter-attacks drove them back towards the water several times, and attempts to put up bridges during the day were foiled by shellfire. Divisional headquarters decided to try again on the night of 12/13 May.

The building of the Amazon bridge was entrusted to three field companies of the Royal Engineers – the 7th, 59th and 225th. The engineers worked in the dark, behind a smokescreen that the German gunners in fact treated as a pointer to the target. Gunfire and mortar fire did not let up all night; the wounded and dead were carried to the rear and others took their places, because the span had to be assembled on the bank and pushed across the river section by section. At five in the morning on 13 May the bridge was ready. In 2022 a memorial made from a section of Bailey bridge was unveiled at the site of the crossing, on the via Folcara.

Across Amazon went first tanks and anti-tank guns, then further infantry battalions. The 4th Division’s bridgehead, until then a narrow strip of killing ground by the river, expanded during the day to a kilometre or more into the valley. In the Indian sector Canadian tanks of the Calgary and Ontario regiments supported the infantry in the fighting for Sant’Angelo and Panaccioni; the ground by the river was soft and a dozen or so Shermans of the Ontario regiment bogged down in the mud – their crews spent the whole day dragging them out under fire. In the afternoon of 13 May a folding tank bridge came to the rescue, over which another squadron crossed through Sant’Angelo to the infantry pinned down by the German positions. Towards evening the village was in the hands of the Indian division, in which Gurkhas and British troops fought alongside the Indian battalions, and on the night of 13/14 May more tanks of the Three Rivers Regiment crossed the river.

This is what lies behind the terse statement that on 13 May the bridgehead on the Gari was reinforced. Reinforcement meant more than additional battalions: only with bridges, tanks and artillery on the western side of the river could XIII Corps pass from defending a scrap of riverbank to attacking towards Highway 6 and Pignataro. The left wing of the German defence in the valley began to crack.

The Germans without their commanders

The offensive caught the German side at the worst possible moment. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, misled by the Allied deception plan, expected a fresh landing on the coast near Civitavecchia rather than a frontal attack by two whole armies at Cassino, and kept some of his reserves away from the Gari. The commander of the Tenth Army, General Heinrich von Vietinghoff, and the commander of XIV Panzer Corps, General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, were in Germany when the attack began, and Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, was ill. The German divisions fought the first, decisive days of the battle under deputies.

The Gari and Cassino sector was defended by LI Mountain Corps, and the town itself and Monastery Hill by the paratroopers of the 1st Parachute Division, who had already held the ruins once, in March. In the Liri valley the defence rested on battalions strung out along the river and on reserves that still had to be brought up. When it became clear on 13 May that the British and Indian troops had bridges and tanks across the Gari, Kesselring began sending into the valley everything he had to hand, including units of the 90th Panzergrenadier Division (PL). The aim was no longer to throw the Allies back into the river but to gain time to man the second position – the Hitler Line, a dozen or so kilometres further west.

Monte Maio and the Aurunci Mountains

The decision came, however, not in the valley but in the mountains on its southern edge. The idea of outflanking Cassino through the Aurunci massif, which the Germans had not strongly garrisoned because they considered it impassable for any sizeable force, came from General Alphonse Juin, commander of the French Expeditionary Corps. The corps comprised four divisions – the 1st Free French Division, the 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division, the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division and the 4th Moroccan Mountain Division – together with three groups of tabors made up of Moroccan goumiers, mountain men used to marching across trackless country and supplied by mule columns. There were Frenchmen among them, but most of the corps consisted of soldiers from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

The first night and the day of 12 May brought the French heavy fighting and losses: the German 71st Infantry Division put up a stubborn defence, and several attacks stalled. On the morning of 13 May General André Dody’s 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division renewed the assault and took Monte Maio, a peak some 940 metres high that dominated the whole sector. A huge French flag was hoisted on the summit, visible from the floor of the Liri valley. Over the next few hours the German defence in the French sector began to fall apart; among the places that fell was Castelforte, for months one of the pillars of the defence on the Garigliano.

The breach at Monte Maio opened the way for General Augustin Guillaume’s mountain group. In the days that followed the goumiers moved along the ridges of the Aurunci Mountains, where the Germans had almost no one, and the French divisions took Ausonia on 15 May and soon afterwards Esperia, coming out behind the German positions in the Liri valley. In his memoirs Mark Clark later called this advance one of the most brilliant and daring moves of the whole war in Italy and the key to the success of the offensive.

A shadow over the victory

The French breakthrough also has a second, dark side, which has not been forgotten in Italy. In the wake of the corps’ advance, above all in the second half of May and in June, mass rapes, killings and looting by colonial soldiers of Juin’s corps, mainly goumiers, took place in the mountain villages of southern Lazio. Italians called these crimes the marocchinate. The victims were women and girls, but also men and boys; among the worst-affected places are Esperia, Ausonia, Pico and Lenola.

The scale of these crimes is disputed. In 1997 the Italian Ministry of Defence put the number of rape victims at 2,000–3,000 women; Italian victims’ associations and some historians give figures several times higher, up to 12,000. By December 1948 some 10,000 claims for compensation had been submitted to the Italian authorities. French military justice brought 207 soldiers to trial and convicted 156 (three of whom were executed), and 28 caught in the act were shot without trial; in 1947 France agreed to pay compensation to 1,488 victims. The story that later became widespread, that before the attack Juin promised his soldiers “fifty hours” of impunity, has no confirmation in the documents. These events formed the background to Alberto Moravia’s novel La ciociara (1957) and its film adaptation, Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women (1960).

The Poles before the second attack

On the Eighth Army’s right wing, 13 May was a day of quiet after defeat. In the first assault, launched on the night of 11/12 May, the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division and the 5th Kresowa Infantry Division had attacked Phantom Ridge, Hill 593, Massa Albaneta and Sant’Angelo. The soldiers reached the summits and lost them to the paratroopers’ counter-attacks, under fire from unseen positions on the neighbouring hills. On the afternoon of 12 May General Anders, after talking to Leese, withdrew the exhausted battalions to their start lines. Losses were very heavy, but the attack tied down the German artillery and paratroopers on the hills at the very moment when British and Indian troops were fighting for the bridgeheads on the Gari – a point later stressed by Polish and British authors alike.

From 13 May II Corps reorganised its units, made up its numbers, revised its plan and waited for the advance in the Liri valley to threaten the rear of Cassino. The second Polish attack was set for 17 May – when XIII Corps, with the 78th Division committed to battle, was due to be reaching Highway 6 behind the backs of the monastery’s defenders.

Place in the war

The events of 13 May sealed the fate of the Gustav Line, even though its best-known point was still holding out. Once the bridgeheads on the Gari had merged into a single front and the French had emerged from the mountains behind the Liri valley, holding Cassino no longer made sense. Over the following days the 78th Division and the tanks of XIII Corps pushed on towards Highway 6, and on the night of 17/18 May the paratroopers abandoned the ruins of the monastery and the town, which the Poles and British occupied on 18 May. The Germans fell back to the Hitler Line; it was broken on 23–24 May by the Canadians in the Liri valley, while the Poles attacked Piedimonte San Germano. That same day the American VI Corps broke out of the Anzio beachhead. On 4 June Clark’s troops entered Rome – but the German Tenth Army, despite heavy losses, slipped out of the trap, because Clark directed his main forces at Rome rather than at its line of retreat.

In the broader perspective, the breakthrough on the Gari was what had been expected of the Italian campaign in the spring of 1944: the offensive tied down more than a dozen German divisions in battle and forced Kesselring to use up his reserves a few weeks before the Normandy landings. It also showed that Italy remained a coalition front like no other – on the Gari and in the Aurunci Mountains British, Indian, Gurkha, Canadian, French, Moroccan, Algerian and Polish soldiers fought side by side, and Bailey bridges and improvisations such as Kingsmill’s bridge became symbols of a war in which engineers decided the breaching of a fortified line no less than the infantry did. At the same time, the breakthrough in the Aurunci Mountains is overshadowed by the crimes committed against the Italian population, which are still remembered in Lazio today.