The fourth battle of Monte Cassino

At 11 p.m. on 11 May 1944 some 1,600 guns of the British Eighth Army and the American Fifth Army opened fire along the whole front from Cassino to the Tyrrhenian Sea. So began Operation Diadem, known as the fourth battle of Monte Cassino – the great offensive that the commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in Italy, General Harold Alexander, had planned after three failed attempts to break through the German Gustav Line. Four corps moved forward in the darkness: the American II Corps by the sea, the French Expeditionary Corps in the Aurunci Mountains, the British XIII Corps on the River Gari at the mouth of the Liri valley and – on the right wing, in the mountains above Cassino – General Władysław Anders’s Polish II Corps, which at one o’clock in the morning of 12 May went in to assault the hills around the monastery.

The frequently encountered statement that the fourth battle of Monte Cassino was “led by General Anders” needs qualifying. Operation Diadem was commanded by Alexander as commander of 15th Army Group; the main forces belonged to General Oliver Leese’s Eighth Army and to General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, which included General Alphonse Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps. The Polish corps, under Leese’s command, was given a special and the best-known task – the capture of the Monte Cassino massif – but it was one of four attacking corps, and the Polish attack itself began on 12 May, a few hours after the artillery barrage of 11 May.

After three failed attacks

Since January 1944 the Allies had tried three times to force the Gustav Line at Cassino. In January and February the Americans and French became bogged down in the mountains north of the town, and the American 36th Division bled itself white in the Rapido crossing – on the very stretch of river that is marked on maps as the Gari. Since the start of the battle the Germans had held Monastery Hill, and on 15 February bombers destroyed the Benedictine abbey, which brought no military advantage whatsoever. In March the third battle turned the town of Cassino into a field of rubble, in which the paratroopers of General Richard Heidrich’s 1st Parachute Division held out against the New Zealanders and Indians.

All these attacks shared a common flaw: single divisions or corps struck at a narrow sector of the front, and the defenders could shift their reserves to wherever a breakthrough threatened. Meanwhile the beachhead at Anzio, where the American VI Corps had landed in January, instead of opening the road to Rome had itself come under siege; after their failed counter-offensives in February the Germans went over to the defensive there, but kept several Allied divisions pinned down inside their ring.

The plan of Operation Diadem

Alexander and his chief of staff, General John Harding, drew lessons from these failures. In line with the guidelines of the Allied high command, the offensive in Italy was above all to tie down as many German divisions as possible at the moment when the cross-Channel invasion began in Western Europe; Alexander, however, wanted something more – the destruction of the German Tenth Army south of Rome. He decided to wait for the spring, when the ground would dry out and tanks could be used, and to strike simultaneously with the forces of two armies on a front some 30 kilometres wide. The idea of outflanking Cassino through the mountains, where the Germans did not expect a major attack, had been urged on him for months by Juin.

Through April and early May a great regrouping was carried out. The main forces of the Eighth Army were moved from the Adriatic coast across the spine of the Apennines to Cassino; the moves were made at night and in small groups, and dummy tanks and vehicles were left in the abandoned positions so that German air reconnaissance would notice nothing. The front was divided into four sectors. On the left wing, along Highway 7 by the sea, the American II Corps was to attack (the 85th and 88th Infantry Divisions, fresh formations that had entered combat only that spring). Next to it, from the bridgehead over the lower Garigliano, Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps – four divisions and the tabors of Moroccan goumiers, trained for mountain warfare – was to strike through the Aurunci Mountains, which separate the coast from the Liri valley. General Sidney Kirkman’s British XIII Corps was to force the Gari south of Cassino with the British 4th and the Indian 8th Infantry Divisions, supported by the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade, and to enter the Liri valley along Highway 6 (the Via Casilina) – the shortest road to Rome. The I Canadian Corps waited in reserve, ready for the pursuit. Once the German Tenth Army had been broken, General Lucian Truscott’s VI Corps was to break out of the Anzio beachhead and cut its line of retreat.

Deceiving the enemy was an important part of the plan. The American 36th Division practised landings near Naples, and false signposts and simulated radio traffic were meant to convince the Germans that the Allies were preparing a new landing on the west coast, near Civitavecchia north of Rome. According to most accounts the ruse worked: Field Marshal Albert Kesselring kept some of his reserves away from Cassino, and even on the second day of the battle he estimated that his four divisions in that sector faced six Allied ones – in reality there were thirteen. The ground offensive was preceded by Operation Strangle, an air operation under way since March, in which Allied aircraft destroyed the railways and supply roads of the German forces in central Italy.

The task of the Polish II Corps

The hardest task – the capture of the Monte Cassino massif, against which all the earlier attacks had broken – was offered to Anders by Leese on 24 March. Anders accepted it without consulting the Commander-in-Chief, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, who was opposed to a frontal assault that would bleed white the only Polish corps fighting on land. Anders believed that, with Moscow having broken off relations with the Polish government in 1943 and Soviet propaganda accusing the Poles of shirking the fight against the Germans, victory in a battle the whole world was talking about would do more for the Polish cause than diplomatic notes. The corps consisted largely of soldiers of the army formed in the USSR in 1941–1942 from Polish citizens released from the gulag camps and prisons. Its core was the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division and the 5th Kresowa Infantry Division, each of only two brigades, together with the 2nd Armoured Brigade and the corps artillery. There was nothing with which to replace losses.

On 24 April the Poles relieved the British 78th Division on the slopes of the massif. The German positions there formed two rings of hills joined in a figure of eight: Hill 593 (Monte Calvario), Massa Albaneta, Hill 569, Phantom Ridge (Widmo) and Colle Sant’Angelo covered one another, so that every point under attack came under fire from several others. A post-war Polish report compared the layout to a Roman amphitheatre, from which every spectator can see the whole arena. The corps plan provided for a simultaneous attack by the 3rd Carpathian Division on Hill 593 and Albaneta and by the 5th Kresowa Division on Phantom Ridge and Sant’Angelo, followed by a descent to the rear of the monastery and a link-up with the British in the Liri valley on Highway 6, near Piedimonte San Germano. Eighth Army headquarters, wishing to conceal the presence of the Poles from the Germans, forbade the corps to send patrols into the ground in front – so the soldiers were to advance at night into terrain they did not know.

On 11 May Anders’s order was read out to the troops. “The task that has fallen to us will make the name of the Polish soldier famous throughout the world,” wrote the corps commander, ending with the motto “God, Honour, Fatherland”.

The Germans caught off guard

The sector from Cassino to the sea was defended by General Heinrich von Vietinghoff’s German Tenth Army. Its XIV Panzer Corps held the front from the Liri to the sea – the 94th Infantry Division on the coast facing the Americans and the 71st Infantry Division facing the French – while General Valentin Feurstein’s LI Mountain Corps defended the entrance to the Liri valley and the massif itself, where Heidrich’s paratroopers once again stood. On the hills facing the Poles was Colonel Ludwig Heilmann’s 3rd Parachute Regiment.

The Germans knew that a spring offensive was coming, but did not know when. According to the American official history (Ernest F. Fisher, Cassino to the Alps), a few hours before the attack Vietinghoff had left for Germany to receive a decoration from Hitler; Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, had been on sick leave for two weeks, and the commander of XIV Panzer Corps, General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, had been on leave since mid-April. When the fighting broke out, several key commanders were thus absent from their posts.

The night of 11/12 May

The barrage began punctually at 11 p.m.: according to the figures usually given, 1,060 guns fired in the Eighth Army’s sector and about 600 in the Fifth Army’s. Within an hour and a half the infantry had moved off in all four sectors. On the Gari the British 4th and Indian 8th Divisions crossed in boats through thick fog mixed with smoke; the strong current swept the boats downstream, and German fire from the fortified bank inflicted heavy losses. By morning both divisions had seized only shallow bridgeheads, but the engineers of General Dudley Russell’s 8th Indian Division had managed to build bridges, over which the tanks of the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade crossed. It was precisely the lack of armoured support across the river that the Americans had suffered in January and the New Zealanders in February.

On the coast the American 85th and 88th Divisions made little headway; in the fighting for the hills around Santa Maria Infante, which were taken only after several days, they suffered heavy losses. The French fared best: the 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division, the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division and the 4th Moroccan Mountain Division broke into the Aurunci range, and by morning some of the first day’s objectives had already been reached.

The first Polish attack

At 1 a.m. on 12 May the Polish infantry moved off. The 2nd Carpathian Rifle Battalion attacked Hills 593 and 569, and the 1st Battalion, reinforced with tanks and sappers, attacked Albaneta through a ravine known as the Gorge (Gardziel). The soldiers advanced through minefields and wire under fire from concrete bunkers that more than an hour of artillery bombardment had failed to destroy. The 2nd Battalion took Hill 593 and by morning had beaten off several counter-attacks by the paratroopers, but fire from Albaneta and Hill 569 decimated the defenders. According to the Polish account of the battle, by midday a dozen or so soldiers and one officer were left on the summit; the rest were withdrawn to their start lines. On the right wing the 13th and 15th Wilno Rifle Battalions of the 5th Kresowa Division broke onto Phantom Ridge between 2.30 and 3 a.m., but in front of Sant’Angelo they were halted by a deep ravine full of mines and machine-gun nests. Around 2 p.m. Anders ordered the units back to their start lines.

The first attack cost the corps very dearly – in the 3rd Carpathian Division alone, according to Polish sources, some 700 killed, wounded and missing, mainly in the two leading battalions. In English-language literature the description of those slopes as “a miniature Verdun” has taken root. Anders wanted to renew the assault that same afternoon, but Leese postponed the second attack because XIII Corps was advancing in the valley more slowly than expected. Until then the Poles were to patrol and harass the enemy day and night, so that the Germans could not take reserves from the massif to the Liri valley. Despite its failure, the attack tied down a large part of Heidrich’s paratroopers in the mountains at a time when the battle was being decided elsewhere.

The first days of the offensive

On the afternoon of 12 May the bridgeheads over the Gari slowly widened, despite violent counter-attacks. The next day the German front began to crack on its southern wing: the French took Monte Maio, and from 14 May the goumiers advanced through mountains that the Germans considered impassable and had barely manned, working round to the rear of the Gustav Line. Kesselring threw every available reserve into the Liri valley to gain time to man the second position, the Hitler Line, a dozen or so kilometres west of Cassino. The second Polish assault on the massif came on 17 May.

Place in the war

Operation Diadem broke the Gustav Line for the first time since January. When the French emerged from the mountains behind the German positions and the British drew close to Highway 6, Kesselring ordered the paratroopers to abandon the massif on the night of 17/18 May. On the morning of 18 May a Polish patrol of the 12th Podolian Uhlans entered the ruins of the monastery and raised the regimental pennant over them. According to the figures usually given, the battle cost the Polish II Corps nearly a thousand dead and several thousand wounded; after the war their graves were gathered in the Polish war cemetery below the monastery, and the song “The Red Poppies on Monte Cassino” (“Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino”), written during the days of the assault, became one of the best-known Polish wartime songs. On 23 May the Allies attacked the Hitler Line, and VI Corps broke out of the Anzio beachhead. Clark’s decision to direct his main forces towards Rome instead of cutting off the Tenth Army’s retreat allowed Vietinghoff’s troops to escape northwards; on 4 June the Americans entered Rome, and two days later the Allies landed in Normandy.

The fourth battle of Monte Cassino thus achieved the aim set for it by the coalition’s high command – the Germans had to reinforce the Italian front at the moment of the invasion of France – but it did not bring about the destruction of the German armies that Alexander had dreamed of, and the war in Italy went on for almost another year. For the Poles the battle had a political dimension from the outset. The capture of Monte Cassino became a symbol of the self-sacrifice of the Polish Armed Forces in the West and an argument in the dispute over Poland’s place among the Allies. It did not, however, change the decisions of the great powers on Poland’s post-war borders and government, and most of the soldiers of Anders’s corps, the majority of whom came from the eastern lands of the Second Polish Republic, did not return home after the war.