The third battle of Monte Cassino

At 8.30 on the morning of 15 March 1944 the first waves of Allied bombers appeared over the town of Cassino at the foot of Monte Cassino. For three and a half hours successive formations of heavy and medium bombers dropped their loads on an area not much larger than a square kilometre, and after them the fire of several hundred guns fell on the ruins. So began the third battle of Monte Cassino – the attack by General Bernard Freyberg’s New Zealand Corps, which was at last to open the Allies’ way into the Liri valley and on to Rome.

The little town, already abandoned by its inhabitants and damaged in earlier fighting, was quite literally razed to the ground that day. The plan assumed that the defenders, stunned by the bombing, would be unable to resist and that the New Zealand infantry would merely have to “mop up” the rubble. It turned out otherwise. The German paratroopers who had survived in cellars and shelters quickly manned the ruins, and bomb craters and heaps of rubble stopped the tanks. For nine days the fighting raged over individual houses, hotels and the rocky slopes below the monastery. On 23 March the attack was called off – the Germans had held both the greater part of the town and the ruins of the abbey.

After the second battle

The second battle of Monte Cassino, preceded by the destruction of the abbey on 15 February, had collapsed by 18 February. From then on the Cassino front became the most important, but also the most intractable, problem for the Allied command in Italy. The first attacks, begun in mid-January, had been intended to support the landing at Anzio by drawing German reserves south; in the event, from February onwards the German 14th Army had tried several times to drive the Allies in the beachhead into the sea – most dangerously in Operation Fischfang, and for the last time in the attack at Cisterna launched on 29 February. Only at the beginning of March did the Germans go over to the defensive at Anzio. The beachhead was no longer in danger, but it was still enclosed in a German ring.

The commander of the Allied forces in Italy, General Harold Alexander, concluded that breaking the Gustav Line at Cassino remained the precondition for linking up with Anzio and advancing on Rome. He again entrusted the task to the New Zealand Corps – an ad hoc formation comprising the 2nd New Zealand Division, the 4th Indian Division and the British 78th Infantry Division, which had arrived at the end of February. The corps came under General Mark Clark’s US Fifth Army.

Operation Dickens

The experience of January and February had put the Allies off both another crossing of the Rapido south of the town and another attempt to outflank the monastery through the mountains from the north. The plan for the third battle, code-named Dickens, provided for two simultaneous attacks from the north, along the Rapido valley: one on Cassino itself, the other on the slopes of Monastery Hill. If the narrow passage between the town and the mountain could be cleared, tanks would be able to reach Highway 6 (the Via Casilina), and the British 78th Division could cross the Rapido below Cassino and begin an advance up the Liri valley.

Air power was to play the key role. The commander of the 4th Indian Division, General Francis Tuker, had been arguing for weeks that a frontal attack on Cassino could succeed only after a massive bombardment. Freyberg adopted the idea, although he did not share Tuker’s reservations about the direction of the attack itself. The Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, headed by General Ira Eaker, took on the task readily: the raid on the town was to show that heavy bombers could clear the way for infantry on the battlefield. Under the plan several hundred aircraft in successive waves were to bomb a rectangle measuring roughly 1,300 by 400 metres, and at noon, behind an artillery barrage, the 6th New Zealand Brigade with tanks of the 19th Armoured Regiment was to enter the town. At the same time the 5th Indian Brigade was to advance along the eastern slopes of Monte Cassino and take Hangman’s Hill (Point 435), just below the monastery.

The attack was originally set for 24 February, but it required at least three days of good weather: tanks and lorries would not have been able to cross the waterlogged fields. For the next three weeks rain forced the attack to be postponed day after day. The soldiers waited in forward positions in the cold and mud, often unable to eat a hot meal, under the fire of German artillery and mortars. On 2 March the commander of the 2nd New Zealand Division, General Howard Kippenberger, stepped on a mine on Monte Trocchio and lost both feet; he was replaced by Brigadier Graham Parkinson. At the beginning of March Tuker also fell ill, and the 4th Indian Division was taken over by General Alexander Galloway. Morale in the corps, which for a month had been able neither to fight nor to rest, grew steadily worse.

Green devils in the ruins

On the other side of the front there had also been changes. The commander of XIV Panzer Corps, General Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, entrusted the defence of the Cassino sector to General Richard Heidrich’s 1st Parachute Division, which relieved the exhausted 90th Panzergrenadier Division battalion by battalion. The paratroopers (Fallschirmjäger (PL)) were regarded as the elite of the Wehrmacht: well trained, experienced from the fighting on Crete, in Russia and in Sicily, and able to operate independently in small groups. In the town itself stood a battalion of Colonel Ludwig Heilmann’s 3rd Parachute Regiment – some 300 men according to most accounts – supported by a few assault guns and tanks hidden inside buildings. The Cassino front came under General Heinrich von Vietinghoff’s 10th Army, and all German forces in Italy were commanded by Field Marshal Albert Kesselring.

The Germans used the weeks of inactivity to strengthen their positions. The cellars of stone houses were turned into shelters linked by passages; machine-gun nests were set up in the buildings along Highway 6 – especially in the Hotel Continental and the Hotel des Roses – and mortars and observation posts were placed on the slopes above the town, in caves and among the rocks. The ruins of the abbey, occupied by the paratroopers after the February bombing, became one of the strongest points of the entire line.

The raid of 15 March

On 14 March the forecast finally improved, and the attack was fixed for the following day. During the night the troops in the most advanced positions in the northern part of the town were quietly withdrawn so as not to be caught under their own bombs. At 8.30 on the morning of 15 March the first wave arrived. According to various calculations some 500 heavy and medium bombers took part in the raid, while Italian and German studies give a total of 575 bombers and about 200 fighter-bombers – the largest concentration of air power yet used in the Mediterranean against a single target on the battlefield. Estimates of the load dropped range from about 750 to more than 1,000 tons; most of it consisted of half-ton bombs with delayed-action fuses, which were meant to penetrate to the cellars.

The accuracy of the raid proved very poor. According to British calculations, only about half the bombs fell within a mile of the aiming point. Some loads hit Allied positions – according to Italian studies, those of the 4th Indian Division, of the Moroccan division of the French corps and a camp of Polish soldiers, killing about a hundred men in all. Several formations mistook their target and bombed towns well over ten kilometres from the front, above all Venafro, and also Isernia and Pozzilli. In Venafro soldiers and civilians were killed; local sources speak of some 400 victims among the population and the military, although the figures given vary. Every year on 15 March the town commemorates the victims of the raid, and in 2005 it was awarded the Gold Medal for Civil Valour for that day.

At noon artillery fire fell on Cassino – according to the most commonly cited figures from 746 guns, which in the space of a few hours fired nearly 200,000 shells. Freyberg, who watched the raid from his command post, was impressed by its power, but the military effect proved much smaller than expected. Of the roughly 300 paratroopers in the town, about half were killed or wounded, and some of the guns and tanks were buried. The survivors, however, quickly emerged from the cellars and sewers, manned the heaps of rubble and opened fire on the approaching infantry.

Fighting in the rubble

Around noon two companies of the New Zealand 25th Battalion, supported by M4 Sherman tanks of the 19th Armoured Regiment, entered the town from the north along Via Caruso. It quickly became clear that the streets no longer existed: they had been replaced by bomb craters several metres deep and mounds of rubble that the tanks could not cross. Engineers and bulldozers tried to clear paths under sniper and mortar fire. Even so, in the afternoon D Company of the 25th Battalion fought its way onto Castle Hill (Point 193), with the ruins of the medieval Rocca Janula fortress, and took it together with the neighbouring Point 165. This was the most important achievement of the first day – Castle Hill dominated the northern part of the town and was the gateway to the road winding up in hairpin bends towards the monastery.

In the evening, contrary to the meteorologists’ forecasts, torrential rain began to fall. Water flooded the craters, the rubble turned into a quagmire, and the radio sets, constantly drenched, stopped working. Clouds hid the moon, on whose light the engineers clearing the paths had been counting. A second attack on the left wing, which was to break through to Highway 6, was ordered too late – the defenders had already had time to regroup. During the night the 1/4th Battalion of the Essex Regiment from the 4th Indian Division, which was to relieve the New Zealanders and push on uphill, reached Castle Hill behind schedule. The 1/6th Battalion of the Rajputana Rifles, which was to take Point 236 on the hairpin bends, was driven back.

The Gurkhas on Hangman’s Hill

In the confusion of the night fighting a company of the 1/9th Battalion of the Gurkha Rifles took a path that bypassed the defended Point 236 and unexpectedly reached Hangman’s Hill – a rocky spur only about 250 metres below the ruins of the monastery. By 17 March the rest of the battalion had joined it. The Gurkhas were closer to the abbey than any Allied unit since the beginning of the battle, but they were practically cut off: their supply routes were cut by the German positions at Point 236 and in the northern part of the town. For nine days they held out on the bare rock under fire, supplied by air drops, many of which fell into German hands or into the ravines.

In the town every house was fought over. On 16 March, thanks to the work of the engineers, the tanks got close to Highway 6; according to some accounts, the New Zealanders held about two-thirds of the ruins. On 17 March the 26th Battalion with tanks took the railway station on the southern edge of the town – the same one the Maori had briefly seized in February. The paratroopers, however, held on in the Hotel Continental and the Hotel des Roses, at the bend of Highway 6 at the foot of Monastery Hill. As long as these buildings remained in their hands, the road to the Liri valley was closed. Worse still, the Germans infiltrated back by night into blocks that had already been declared clear, and snipers fired on soldiers and stretcher-bearers from behind.

The counter-attack from the monastery and the raid on Albaneta

Freyberg planned a decisive blow for 19 March. The Gurkhas on Hangman’s Hill and the Essex battalion on Castle Hill were to attack the ruins of the abbey, while at the same time tanks of the New Zealand 20th Armoured Regiment – supported, according to some accounts, by American and Indian detachments – were to travel along an old forest track that engineers had been secretly widening for weeks (known as the “Cavendish Road”) from Caira as far as Albaneta farm behind the monastery, and attack it from the rear.

The Germans forestalled this plan. At dawn on 19 March a battalion of paratroopers – some 300 men according to Italian studies – charged down from the ruins of the monastery and attacked Castle Hill. The fighting was hand to hand, within the walls of the medieval fortress; several times the paratroopers forced their way into the courtyard, and each time they were driven back with heavy losses. The castle was held, but the attack on the monastery became impossible – the castle’s defenders were themselves fighting for survival, and the Gurkhas on Hangman’s Hill were cut off even more completely. The order calling off the tank raid did not reach the tank crews. The armoured column got as far as the Albaneta area, but without infantry support it was an easy target for German guns and for grenadiers armed with anti-tank weapons. By the afternoon most of the tanks had been destroyed or abandoned.

On 20 March Freyberg committed the first units of the British 78th Division: they were to thicken the garrison of the town, so that the Germans could not return to cleared blocks, and to reinforce Castle Hill. According to Italian studies, Clark, aware that Alexander intended to move the British Eighth Army to the Cassino front, pressed Freyberg to make one more attempt and on 22 March gave him extra time to take the monastery. Further attacks by the Gurkhas and the British on the hairpin bends and by the New Zealanders on the Hotel Continental were beaten off. By now the front was gaining only single houses.

The attack is called off

On 23 March Alexander gathered his commanders for a conference. Opinions on the chances of success were divided, but there was no doubt that the 2nd New Zealand Division and the 4th Indian Division were exhausted. Freyberg concluded that further attacks were pointless, and the battle was broken off. The following days were spent stabilising the line and withdrawing the cut-off units: under cover of darkness the Gurkhas left Hangman’s Hill, and an isolated detachment of the New Zealand 24th Battalion came down from Point 202. The Allies kept Castle Hill and the parts of the town they had captured – from then on the front ran through the middle of the ruins, sometimes only a dozen or so metres apart, from one side of a street to the other.

The New Zealand Corps was dissolved on 26 March, and the sector was taken over by the British XIII Corps. In the mountains the exhausted Indian division was replaced by the 78th Division, and in the town by the British 1st Guards Brigade. The 4th Indian Division, which since February had lost some 3,000 killed, wounded and missing at Cassino (nearly 4,000 by some calculations), moved to a quieter sector on the Adriatic; the 2nd New Zealand Division had lost about 1,600 men on the Cassino front. The losses of the New Zealand Corps itself in the third battle are estimated at about 2,500 men. The German paratroopers also paid a high price: according to the war diary of XIV Panzer Corps, on 23 March the front-line battalions numbered between 40 and 120 men. On 25 March Heidrich was awarded the Swords to the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, and the defence of Cassino was mentioned in the Wehrmacht communiqué. The nickname “the green devils of Cassino” stuck to the paratroopers for a long time.

The third battle was judged critically even during the war. The bombing, which was supposed to paralyse the defence, created ideal terrain for the defenders: the rubble provided excellent cover, and the craters stopped the tanks on which the whole plan depended. Once again the attack was made with only two divisions on a narrow, predictable sector, without the superiority an attack in the mountains requires. Senger later called the attack “hard to understand” – for the third time the Allies had struck the strongest point of the line. The air forces, moreover, soon changed their priorities: from 19 March the Allied air forces conducted Operation Strangle – the bombing of the railways, roads and bridges north of Rome by which supplies reached the German armies. It did not force the Germans to retreat, but it seriously hampered their defence in May.

Place in the war

The failure of the third battle ended the period of hasty frontal attacks at Cassino. Alexander finally adopted the idea that Generals Alphonse Juin and Geoffrey Keyes had been putting to him for months: instead of striking again and again at the same point, to prepare a great offensive by two armies on a broad front, outflanking the German positions through the mountains. Throughout April and early May the forces were regrouped – General Oliver Leese’s British Eighth Army moved from the Adriatic coast to the Cassino and Liri valley sector, and the Fifth Army concentrated on the lower Garigliano. As early as 24 March Leese proposed to General Władysław Anders that the Polish II Corps should capture the Monte Cassino massif. Anders accepted the task.

The fourth battle, Operation Diadem, began on the night of 11–12 May 1944. The French crossed the Aurunci Mountains, the British forced the Rapido and cut Highway 6, and the Poles, in two bloody assaults, tied down the paratroopers in the massif. On 18 May, after the Germans had withdrawn for fear of encirclement, a Polish patrol raised a flag over the ruins of the monastery, and the British occupied the ruins of the town. The ruins of Cassino, taken house by house in March, were largely rebuilt from scratch after the war. The March battle remained in the memory of the New Zealanders, the Indians and the Gurkhas as one of the hardest episodes of their war – and as a warning that even the most powerful bombing cannot replace a well-conceived plan of attack on the ground.