The destruction of the Abbey of Monte Cassino

On the morning of 15 February 1944, at about 9.30, the first wave of American heavy bombers appeared over the hill of Monte Cassino. Within a few hours aircraft and artillery had reduced to rubble the Benedictine abbey founded in the 6th century by Saint Benedict of Nursia – one of the most important sites of Christian Europe. The destruction of the monastery opened the second battle of Monte Cassino: the attack of the New Zealand Corps, which lasted until 18 February and ended in failure.

The Allies justified the raid by claiming that the Germans were using the abbey as an artillery observation post and a shelter for their troops. That belief needs qualifying: it was shared by some commanders and airmen, but not all – the commanders of the US Fifth Army opposed it, and later research showed that the Germans had not occupied the monastery itself, although their positions lay right beneath its walls. Those killed inside were Italian civilians who had sought refuge there. Only after the building had been destroyed did German paratroopers set up defensive positions in the ruins – and they held them for the next three months.

An abbey on the front line

The first battle of Monte Cassino began on 17 January, when the British X Corps forced the lower Garigliano, and over the following days the US 36th Infantry Division suffered a bloody defeat in its attempt to cross the Rapido. From 24 January the US 34th Infantry Division crossed the river north of the town of Cassino and in heavy fighting pushed into the mountains. By early February its soldiers were a few hundred metres from the monastery walls, but they were unable to take the key Point 593 (Monte Calvario). The last assault broke down on 11 February, by which time the infantry battalions had lost up to 80 per cent of their strength.

The monastery hill – 520 metres above the valley of the Liri – was the pivot of the German Gustav Line. From its slopes and the neighbouring ridges German observers could see every movement in the valley and direct accurate artillery fire. On the summit stood the massive pile of the abbey: walls a dozen or more metres high and several metres thick at the base, with narrow windows resembling embrasures. To the soldiers who had been fighting at the foot of the hill for weeks, it felt like an ever-present, hostile eye.

In the autumn of 1943 Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel and Captain Maximilian Becker of the Hermann Göring Panzer Division proposed removing the abbey’s treasures. With the consent of the 78-year-old abbot, Gregorio Diamare (PL), the division’s lorries carried the archive, the library and works of art to Rome, including collections deposited there by Neapolitan museums; on 8 December 1943 most of them were handed over to the Vatican, although some paintings were seized on the way for Hermann Göring. Most of the monks left for Rome; the abbot, a few monks and the families of tenant farmers remained in the monastery.

In December Field Marshal Albert Kesselring assured the Holy See, and through it the Allies, that his troops would not enter the monastery. A zone was marked out around the walls that soldiers were forbidden to enter. The undertaking, however, covered only the building itself: according to the monks’ accounts, the zone ceased to be observed at the beginning of January, and the Germans set up machine-gun posts, observation points and ammunition dumps on the slopes just below the walls. As the fighting drew nearer, hundreds of refugees from Cassino and the surrounding villages poured into the abbey, which was regarded as the only safe place in the area.

Freyberg’s request

After the failure of the first attack, the roles were reversed. The Anzio landing of 22 January had not forced the Germans to abandon the Gustav Line – on the contrary, the beachhead itself was in danger, and the Germans were preparing a major counter-offensive against it. The new attack at Cassino was therefore intended above all to draw German reserves away from Anzio. At the beginning of February the commander of 15th Army Group, General Harold Alexander, formed the New Zealand Corps from divisions brought over from the Adriatic front and placed it under the command of General Bernard Freyberg. It comprised the 2nd New Zealand Division and General Francis Tuker’s 4th Indian Infantry Division – veterans of the fighting in North Africa, in which Gurkhas and a British battalion of the Royal Sussex served alongside Hindu and Muslim battalions.

The Indians were to take the ridges above the monastery and the monastery hill itself. Tuker, confined to a hospital bed at Caserta by an attack of rheumatic illness, studied a description of the abbey’s construction in a 19th-century book bought in a Naples bookshop and concluded that the building had to be destroyed – whether or not the Germans were inside. He argued that a building which could at any moment shelter hundreds of soldiers from artillery fire made an assault on the hill impossible; the engineers had no means of dealing with such walls, and only the heaviest bombs could help. His stand-in as divisional commander asked for an air strike on 11 February, and Freyberg passed on the formal request the next day. According to the Fifth Army staff’s account, he said he wanted the monastery bombed because the commander of the division leading the attack considered it a primary target, and he fully agreed with him.

Not everyone shared this view. General Mark Clark, commander of the Fifth Army, to which the corps was subordinate, and his chief of staff Alfred Gruenther saw no military necessity for destroying the monastery. General Geoffrey Keyes, commander of the US II Corps, warned that ruins would make a better fortress for the Germans than the intact building, and maintained that when flying over the hill he had seen no soldiers in the abbey. Even within the New Zealand Corps, General Howard Kippenberger, who had taken over the 2nd Division, later wrote that the abbey left intact would have been less useful to the Germans than bombed. The airmen saw it differently: the commander of the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, General Ira Eaker, and General Jacob Devers, deputy to the Supreme Commander, General Henry Maitland Wilson, claimed after flying over the hill that they had seen a radio mast and men in uniform there. In the airmen’s plans, a modest request for a few fighter-bombers turned into a major heavy-bomber operation.

Clark later recalled that had Freyberg been an American he would simply have turned down his request, but in view of the political standing of the commander of the New Zealand forces – Freyberg was answerable to the government in Wellington – he passed the matter to Alexander. Alexander approved the bombing. In his memoirs he justified it by arguing that when soldiers are fighting for a just cause and are ready to suffer death and wounds, bricks and mortar, however venerable, cannot be allowed to outweigh human lives. He also admitted that the destruction of the monastery was needed more for the sake of the attackers’ morale than for purely military reasons.

The leaflets of 14 February

The raid was planned for 13 February, but bad weather put it back by two days. On 14 February Allied guns fired propaganda shells containing leaflets over the monastery. The text, beginning with the words “Amici italiani, attenzione!” (Italian friends, beware!) and signed by the Fifth Army, stated that the Allies had so far tried to spare the abbey but that the Germans had taken advantage of its immunity, and it called on everyone in the monastery to leave it immediately. The warning gave no date for the attack.

In the abbey it caused despair. The refugees were afraid to go out onto slopes where fighting was going on and the shells of both sides were falling. Some hid in the monastery’s vaults, some in nearby caves, and some were led out by the Germans at night. Abbot Diamare tried, through German officers, to arrange safe passage with both sides for the monks and civilians; permission to leave by the mule track came too late.

The raid of 15 February

The day was sunny. According to a German report, the first wave arrived at 9.30 a.m. and further waves at 9.40 and 10 a.m. In all, 142 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers of the US Fifteenth Air Force passed over the hill, followed in the afternoon by 47 B-25 Mitchell and 40 B-26 Marauder medium bombers. Figures for the quantity of high-explosive and incendiary bombs dropped vary: the most frequently cited tallies speak of some 1,150 tons, whereas calculations based on the reports of individual air units give a few hundred tons – about 250 tons from the heavy bombers and about 100 tons from the medium ones. Between the waves the hill was shelled by the artillery of the US II Corps, and in the afternoon and the next day it was attacked by a further 59 fighter-bombers.

High-altitude bombing was inaccurate. It is estimated that only one in ten of the bombs dropped by the heavy bombers hit the monastery; others fell on the slopes, on Allied positions, and even on the Fifth Army’s headquarters at Presenzano, far behind the front. Allied soldiers and war correspondents cheered at the sight of the explosions. Eaker and Devers watched the raid from close by, while Clark and Gruenther remained at headquarters. The commander of the French Expeditionary Corps, General Alphonse Juin, is said to have remarked at the time that nothing would be achieved this way.

When the dust settled, all that was left of the abbey were heaps of rubble and fragments of the outer walls. The basilica, the cloisters and the monks’ cells were destroyed; part of the underground vaults survived, including the crypt with the tomb of Saint Benedict. The German commander of XIV Panzer Corps, General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin – a Catholic and a Benedictine lay oblate – reported to his superiors that same day that, according to the sector commander, Colonel Karl Lothar Schulz of the 1st Parachute Regiment, the troops had had no weapons whatsoever in the monastery.

The victims and the abbot’s testimony

Italian civilians who had taken refuge in the monastery were killed under the rubble. Their number has never been established precisely: the figure most often given – following the findings of a local historian in 1977 – is about 230 dead, while other estimates speak of several hundred. According to consistent witness accounts, however, most of the refugees survived. There is no evidence that a single German soldier was killed in the abbey. The survivors included the abbot, a few monks who had hidden in the deep cellars, and several dozen others: tenant farmers’ families, orphaned children, the gravely wounded and the dying.

In the evening a German lieutenant appeared in the ruins and asked the abbot to sign a statement that no Germans had been in the monastery at the time of the raid; Diamare signed it. At 7.30 a.m. on 17 February the abbot led the survivors down a path towards the Liri valley, reciting the rosary. The next day he was received by Senger, and the conversation and a further statement by the abbot were exploited by German propaganda. On the way to Rome, SS men took Diamare to a radio station, where he was made to deliver a statement, and at the German embassy to the Holy See he was pressed to sign a memorandum condemning the Allies – this he refused to do. Joseph Goebbels’s ministry widely circulated photographs and films of the smoking ruins as proof of Allied “barbarism”, set against German concern for cultural treasures.

Pope Pius XII remained publicly silent. The Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, nevertheless told Harold Tittmann, the American diplomat at the Vatican, that the bombing had been “a colossal blunder” and “a piece of gross stupidity”. The Holy See stressed that the Germans had kept the assurances they had given it.

The Germans in the ruins

Once the monastery had been destroyed, the German undertaking became meaningless. The sector was then held by troops of the 90th Panzergrenadier Division and Schulz’s paratroopers attached to it; it was they who quickly occupied the ruins and set up firing positions and observation posts in them. At the end of February the whole Cassino sector was taken over by General Richard Heidrich’s 1st Parachute Division. The heaps of rubble and the remains of walls several metres thick proved better cover than the intact building: they protected against bombs and shells, and bombardments could be sat out in the vaults. Keyes’s and Kippenberger’s fears came true to the letter – the ruined monastery became part of a German fortress that the Allies did not take until May.

The attacks of 15–18 February

The raid had not been coordinated with the ground forces. Its timing was set by the airmen, guided by the weather forecast and the needs of other fronts; the brigade commanders of the 4th Indian Division, gathered for a briefing that morning, were astonished to see the bombers flying overhead. The Indians had taken over the positions from the Americans only two days earlier, and downpours and mud hampered the movement of ammunition and supplies into the mountains. No one was ready to go straight into the assault. Worse still, the bombs had spared the most dangerous German positions: the paratroopers’ nests on Point 593, above and behind the monastery, were untouched.

The first attack came only during the night of 15–16 February. A company of the 1st Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, attacked Point 593 from a few dozen metres away and lost half its strength. The next night the whole battalion tried again – once more without success; shells from its own artillery, skimming low over the ridge, also fell among its ranks. During the night of 17–18 February the main attack went in: the 4th/6th Rajputana Rifles struck at Point 593, and two Gurkha battalions at Point 444 and straight up the ravines towards the monastery. The Gurkhas attacking the abbey ran into dense, mined scrub under machine-gun fire and suffered heavy losses. The fighting was hand to hand, on bare rock, but the paratroopers held their positions.

The same night, in the valley, two companies of the 28th (Māori) Battalion of the 2nd New Zealand Division crossed the Rapido along the railway embankment and took the station on the southern edge of Cassino. The engineers, however, failed to build a crossing for tanks over the flooded ground before dawn. On the afternoon of 18 February a German counter-attack with tanks, under cover of a smokescreen, forced the Māori back across the river; of the roughly 200 men who had gone into the attack, about 130 were killed or wounded. Freyberg called off the attack. The second battle of Monte Cassino ended after four days, with the Germans still holding all the key positions.

A controversy that endures

The commanders themselves were divided over the raid. Alexander defended his decision to the end, citing the soldiers’ lives, which he held to outweigh the value of the monument. Clark, in his memoirs published in 1950, called the bombing not only an unnecessary psychological mistake in the propaganda field but also a tactical military mistake of the first magnitude – noting that it had made the German defence easier. Historians point out that the view that the Germans had an observation post within the monastery walls rested on vague grounds: observations from aircraft, press reports, and the conviction of soldiers who had been under fire from below the hill for weeks.

The official position of the United States shifted over a quarter of a century. In 1961 the US Office of the Chief of Military History removed from its documents the assertion that German use of the abbey had been “irrefutable”; a few years later, in reply to a congressional inquiry, it admitted that there had been no German soldiers in the monastery apart from a small military police detachment, and in 1969 it finally acknowledged that the abbey had not been occupied by the Germans. The destruction of Monte Cassino has become one of the most frequently cited examples of the dilemma a commander faces when a historic monument lies on the front line.

Place in the war

The destruction of the abbey brought the Allies no closer to Rome. Nor did the second battle draw German reserves away from Anzio: on 16 February, the day after the raid, the Fourteenth Army launched a major counter-offensive against the beachhead, which for several days threatened to drive the Allies into the sea. At Cassino there followed a winter pause in the attacks. The third battle began on 15 March with another massive air raid – this time on the town of Cassino itself – and it too became bogged down in rubble that impeded tanks and gave cover to the defenders.

The Gustav Line was broken only in the fourth battle, Operation Diadem, launched on 11 May. On 18 May 1944 soldiers of General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps occupied the ruins of the monastery, which the paratroopers had abandoned for fear of encirclement, and raised the Polish flag over them. Below the hill the Polish War Cemetery was later laid out, where more than a thousand of the fallen are buried.

After the war the abbey was rebuilt to its old plans, largely at the expense of the Italian state, and the surviving archive and library returned to their places. On 24 October 1964 Pope Paul VI reconsecrated the basilica and proclaimed Saint Benedict patron of Europe. The rubble of 15 February 1944 nevertheless remained a symbol of that part of the war in which the victims of the fighting were not only armies but also the people and the heritage that happened to lie in the path of the front.