Battles of Monte Cassino
Four battles were fought for a hill and an abbey in central Italy between January and May 1944, and the Allies took some 55,000 casualties doing it. The Gustav Line ran across the narrowest part of the peninsula, anchored on mountains and the flooded Rapido and Garigliano valleys, and Monte Cassino sat above the only practical route to Rome. The Benedictine abbey on the summit had been founded in 529 and had been destroyed and rebuilt three times before. The Germans had not occupied it, and had moved its library and treasures to the Vatican. Allied commanders, under pressure and convinced that observers were inside, had it bombed flat on 15 February by 142 heavy bombers, killing some 230 civilian refugees sheltering there. German paratroopers then occupied the ruins, which were far better defensive positions than the intact building. The fighting was as bad as anything in the western theatre: frozen mountainsides, mule supply, ravines under observation, and repeated frontal assaults by American, British, Indian, New Zealand and Polish troops. The line was finally broken in May by a wide French colonial corps attack through the Aurunci mountains that the Germans had thought impassable, and Polish troops took the ruins on 18 May. The pursuit that should have trapped the German Tenth Army was turned aside by Mark Clark towards Rome, which he entered on 4 June, two days before Normandy. The abbey was rebuilt exactly as it had been by 1964. The bombing is still cited in arguments about cultural property in war, and it produced the Allied monuments officers and eventually the 1954 Hague Convention. The Polish cemetery is on the slope below the abbey, where the men who took it are buried facing it.
- Year: 1944 CE
- Category: Military
