“Man Is Distinguished from the Beasts”
AS FISCHFANG played out at Anzio, another crowded hour ticked away for Monte Cassino and the armies encircling the abbey. Freyberg the New Zealander had become ever more insistent on obliterating the building before launching an attack, and his bellicosity was soon to be inflamed by word that his only child, a young officer in the Grenadier Guards, had gone missing at Anzio. A Royal Artillery gunner said of the looming white edifice, “Somehow it was the thing that was holding up all our lives and keeping us away from home. It became identified in an obsessional way with all the things we detested.”
Willy-nilly bombing of priceless cultural icons was discouraged by custom and forbidden by law. Months earlier the Combined Chiefs had reminded Eisenhower that “consistent with military necessity, the position of the church and of all religious institutions shall be respected and all efforts made to preserve the local archives, historical and classical monuments, and objects of art.” Eisenhower in turn warned his lieutenants in late December that “military necessity” should not be abused as an expedient for military convenience. Alexander’s headquarters in mid-January identified the Monte Cassino abbey and the papal estate at Castel Gandolfo as two preeminent “eccelesiastical centres which it is desired to preserve.” An Allied pamphlet, titled “Preservation of Works of Art in Italy,” included a section headed “Why Is Italy So Rich in Works of Art?” and the assertion that “man is distinguished from the beasts by his power to reason and to frame abstract hopes and ideas.” Bomber-crew briefing packets included street maps, copied from Baedeker guidebooks, that highlighted historic buildings to avoid. Allied staff officers assigned to repair inadvertent damage were known as Venus Fixers.
Already the Venus Fixers had been busy. Bombs had damaged forty churches in Naples alone; the magnificent bronze doors on a cathedral north of the city were reduced to particles. Errant bombs hit Castel Gandolfo several times in early February, and one such misadventure killed seventeen nuns. But deliberate destruction of Monte Cassino would escalate this “war in a museum,” as Kesselring called the Italian campaign, and within Allied war councils arguments for and against were marshaled with warm intensity.
The unit ordered to capture the massif, the 4th Indian Division, remained keenest to “drench” the hill with bombs. A dubious report from a captured German prisoner, who claimed that paratroopers had put a command post and an aid station within the abbey, led the 4th Indian on February 12 to publish an intelligence summary titled “Violation of Geneva Convention.” Other imagined sightings included those by an Italian civilian who reported thirty machine guns, a 34th Division colonel who saw the flash of field glasses in an abbey window, and U.S. gunners who swore that hostile small-arms fire had streamed from the building. A British newspaper on February 11 printed the incendiary headline “Nazis Turn Monastery into Fort.”
On February 14, two senior American generals, Ira Eaker and Jacob Devers, flew in an observation phase at fifteen hundred feet over Monte Cassino and reported seeing “Germans in the courtyard and also their antennas,” as well as a machine-gun nest fifty yards from the abbey wall. Another American airman, Major General John K. Cannon, pledged, “If you let me use the whole of our bomber force against Cassino, we will whip it out like a dead tooth.” An American artillery commander told The New York Times, “I have Catholic gunners in this battery and they’ve asked me for permission to fire on the monastery.” Indeed, the wolf had risen in the heart. A U.S. air wing intelligence analysis declared on February 14, “This monastery has accounted for the lives of upwards of 2,000 boys…. This monastery must be destroyed and everyone in it, as there is no one in it but Germans.”
Others passionately disagreed. The French commander, General Juin, pleaded with Clark to spare the building. General Keyes, also a devout Catholic, took his own plane above the abbey on the morning of February 14 and saw “no signs of activity.” Bombing the building would be “an unnecessary outrage,” he told his diary, particularly because II Corps intelligence detected as many as two thousand refugees now sheltering inside. Moreover, “a partially destroyed edifice is much better for defensive purposes than an untouched one.” Keyes’s irritation at Freyberg grew so intense that Clark rebuked him for “your somewhat belligerent attitude”; the men exchanged peace offerings, with Keyes sending a package of butter, catsup, and Nescafé, and Spadger reciprocating with New Zealand lambs’ tongue, canned oysters, and honey. Still fuming, Keyes wrote, “Why we Americans have to kowtow to the British and by order of our American commanders is beyond me.”
Freyberg was not to be denied, and with Clark at the beachhead he pressed Gruenther for a decision, even though he put the odds of capturing the massif after a bombardment at no better than “fifty-fifty.” If Clark refused to destroy the building, Freyberg added darkly, he would “have to take the responsibility” for New Zealand Corps casualties. Alexander’s new chief of staff, Lieutenant General John H. Harding, also pressured Gruenther. “General Alexander has made his position quite clear,” Harding said in a phone call. “He regrets very much that the monastery should be destroyed, but he sees no other choice.” General Alex “has faith in General Freyberg’s judgment.”
Clark had no such faith. “I now have five corps under my command, only two of which are American, all others of different nationalities,” he wrote in his diary. “I think Napoleon was right when he came to the conclusion that it was better to fight allies than to be one of them.” But he sensed that yet another die had been cast. In a phone call from Alexander, Clark made a last effort to forestall the attack. No clear evidence placed Germans in the abbey. “Previous efforts to bomb a building or a town to prevent its use by the Germans…always failed,” he added. “It would be shameful to destroy the abbey and its treasure,” not to mention any innocent civilians inside. “If the Germans are not in the monastery now, they certainly will be in the rubble after the bombing ends,” Clark said.
Alexander conceded the points, then shrugged them off. “Bricks and mortar, no matter how venerable, cannot be allowed to weigh against human lives,” he argued. Freyberg was “a very important cog in the commonwealth effort. I would be most reluctant to take responsibility for his failing and for his telling his people, ‘I lost five thousand New Zealanders because they wouldn’t let me use air as I wanted.’” Not least, Alexander felt scalding pressure from London. “What are you doing sitting down doing nothing?” the prime minister demanded in a preposterous cable. “Why don’t you use your armour in a great scythe-like movement through the mountains?”
Clark capitulated. If Freyberg were American, he told Alexander, he would deny the request. But “due to the political daintiness” of the circumstances—Spadger in effect commanded a small national army—there was little choice but to procede with the plan now code-named Operation AVENGER. In a dictated memo, Clark condemned Alexander for “unduly interfering with Fifth Army activities,” adding, “It is too bad unnecessarily to destroy one of the art treasures of the world.”
The attack would be launched quickly, to exploit a narrow window of fair weather. Freyberg had proposed dropping a single token bomb as a warning to refugees hiding in the abbey. Instead, on Monday night, February 14, Allied gunners lobbed two dozen shells that burst three hundred feet above Monte Cassino, showering the abbey with leaflets. “Amici italiani, ATTENZIONE!” they read:
Now that the battle has come close to your sacred walls we shall, despite our wish, have to direct our arms against the monastery. Abandon it at once. Put yourselves in a safe place. Our warning is urgent.
A pleasant morning sun peeped above the Abruzzi peaks on Tuesday, February 15, the harbinger of an Italian spring that surely must come soon. A battered, roofless Volkswagen sped downhill from a decrepit palazzo in Roccaseca, past the ruined castle where the saintly Thomas Aquinas had been born, then left onto Highway 6 in the Liri Valley. Beyond the village of Piedimonte, barely three miles northwest of the gleaming abbey ahead, t
he car turned onto a farm road and lurched to a stop. A tall, slender man wearing the high-collared tunic of a Wehrmacht lieutenant general climbed from the front seat, scanning the knifeblade ridges for enemies even as he admired the luminous vision crowning Monte Cassino.
For five months Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin had rambled across these hills, swinging his six-foot ashplant, his loping gait said to resemble a sailor’s more than a soldier’s, often chatting up peasants in his passable, lisping Italian. Since October he had commanded XIV Panzer Corps in Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army, responsible first for defending part of the Bernhardt Line and now a fifty-mile stretch of the Gustav Line; no man contributed more to Allied miseries at San Pietro, the Rapido River, and Cassino than Senger. His high forehead, hooked beak, and sunken cheeks gave him the air of a homely ascetic, although his long fingers and aesthete’s mannerisms suggested a man “more French really than Prussian,” as his daughter later claimed. Descended from an ancient family of lesser princes that lost its estates in the Napoleonic Wars and its wealth in the Weimar inflation, Senger had studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar before finding his calling in the Great War; when his younger brother was killed at Cambrai in 1917, Senger dug for hours through a mass grave in no-man’s-land, determined to give him a more dignified interment. “At last we got the body out, which had lain in the lowest of the three levels,” he later wrote. “I took hold of my brother’s legs and dragged him thus into my car. On the seat beside me sat my lifeless brother.”
In this war he had helped capture Cherbourg, then commanded a panzer division near Stalingrad before serving as Kesselring’s senior liaison to Italian forces in Sicily. Later, as commander of German troops on Corsica and Sardinia, Senger had refused Hitler’s order to shoot turncoat Italian officers, an impertinence only pardoned after he successfully evacuated the entire German garrison. Since taking over the Cassino front he had scrupulously followed orders to keep his troops away from the abbey lest they anger the Vatican; when Abbot Diamare invited Senger to Christmas dinner and mass in the Monte Cassino crypt, he avoided looking out the windows rather than violate the abbey’s neutrality by scanning Allied positions below. German observation posts were dug below the hill crest, where they were better camouflaged anyway.
“The rotten thing is to keep fighting and fighting and to know all along that we have lost this war,” he told an aide, his brushy eyebrows dancing. Now, with his corps at times losing a battalion or more each day, “annihilation was only a matter of time.” Kesselring’s cheery attitude baffled him; after five months in the Italian mountains, Senger insisted that “optimism is the elixir of life for the weak.” He bore the burden—and the stain of serving a National Socialist cause he despised—as best he could, sipping wine in his Roccasecca refuge while listening to evening concerts on his service radio, or sitting with comrades to again watch his favorite movie, Der Weisse Traum—The White Dream—about a lovesick Viennese theater manager. He read Aquinas and found cold comfort in the theologian’s teaching that “no man can be held answerable for the misdeeds of those over whom he has no power.” Upon learning of German atrocities in Poland, Senger wrote, “Oh the loneliness when one hears of such things on which one must be silent.”
Now he heard something else. At 9:45 A.M., as he conferred with grenadier officers in a cylindrical concrete command post near Piedimonte, the drone of bomber engines drew Senger outside. He craned his long neck and shaded his eyes. Tiny cruciforms filled the blue sky three miles above Monte Cassino, their paths etched by milky contrails. Then swarms of bright pellets tumbled toward the abbey, as if heaven itself were throwing silver stones.
An officer in the 4th Indian Division wrote in his battalion log, “Someone said, ‘Flying Fortresses,’ then followed the whistle, swish and blast as the first flights struck against the monastery.” To a B-17 pilot peering down from his cockpit, “the mountain seemed to gust upward like a volcano.” As the initial bombs struck the abbey roof, dust spurting from the windows reminded a 34th Division lieutenant of “smoke coming out of a man’s ears.”
They were the first of 250 bombers—B-17s, B-25s, B-26s—that by day’s end would dump nearly six hundred tons of high explosives and incendiaries on Monte Cassino. Hundreds of artillery rounds joined the bombardment, including enormous shells from 240mm and 8-inch howitzers. In the Rapido Valley, a stand of poplar trees that had been sawed three-quarters through were now pushed over to give gunners a clear field of fire.
Soldiers on both sides of the hill watched spellbound as a caldron of smoke and flame boiled from the hilltop. “Scores of us—Yanks, British, Indians and Kiwis—line the ridge, looking at the destruction through glasses,” an American ambulance driver noted in his diary. “Three lieutenants jump up and down with excitement every time a rack of bombs breaks over the hill.” The sight was “gigantically stimulating…comparable to seeing the early Christians being eaten by lions,” a Royal Artillery gunner wrote. “We all started cheering wildly and hugging each other. Here we are, cheering the destruction of one of the great monuments of Christendom.” The reporter Martha Gellhorn found herself braying “like all the other fools,” while her colleague Frank Gervasi heard someone murmur, “Beautiful precision.” Maoris and Kiwis preparing to storm the Cassino rail station bellowed, “Shovel it on!” and “Give the fuckers hell!”
Hell they got. The leaflet barrage the previous evening had terrified the abbey’s refugees—their numbers were estimated at between 800 and 2,500—but confused attempts to contact German troops about safe passage down Monte Cassino had failed. Some refugees suspected the monks of counterfeiting the warning leaflets as a ruse to clear the abbey of riffraff.
Abbot Diamare planned to evacuate the abbey in his own time, on Wednesday morning. His monks had been distracted by the death from fever of a young brother, whose corpse, dressed in a robe and laid in a coffin he himself had built from bed planks, was given to God in the little chapel of St. Anne. This morning they had observed the liturgy of the hours as usual in the abbey’s deepest cells, and were on their knees before a painted Madonna, singing “Beseech Christ on Our Behalf,” when the first stupendous shudder shook the building. Explosion followed explosion, the corridors filled with choking dust, smoke, and shattered masonry. The abbot offered absolution to each monk. They stuffed their ears with cotton wadding against the roar of the bombs and the screams of women and children overhead.
By two P.M. the abbey was a smoldering memory. Thirteen hundred bombs and another twelve hundred high-explosive incendiaries had smashed the cloisters, shearing off courtyard palms and decapitating the statue of St. Benedict. The grand staircase lay in ruins. Drifts of rubble fifteen feet high filled the basilica aisles, where frescoes, an ancient organ, and choir stalls carved by Neapolitan artisans were reduced to flinders. Protected in their subterranean vaults, the monks forced a passage upstairs through the wreckage to find scores of dead refugees—including many cut down by artillery fire as they fled outside—and those still alive “crazy with terror,” in one monk’s description. “Parents abandoned their shrieking children and fled to safety,” according to a German account. “Sons fled, leaving their aged parents to their fate. One woman had both her feet blown off.”
No mortal would ever know how many died. Estimates ranged from more than one hundred to more than four hundred; the official British history put the figure at “three or four hundred.” After the war, 148 skulls would be found in the debris, with others no doubt pulverized. “Some of the bodies were found in small rooms in which they had suffocated, such as an old man who had tried to protect a child with his body,” wrote Herbert Bloch, a Harvard classics scholar and author of Monte Cassino in the Middle Ages. The attitudes of the dead reminded archaeologists of Pompeii.
Alexander’s headquarters asserted that two hundred Germans were seen fleeing the abbey ruins, a ludicrous claim. Shortly after noon, Senger tore himself away from the mesmerizing spectacle atop Monte Cassino to send Vietinghoff the message th
at damage was extensive and that “numerous civilian refugees are in the abbey.” Under orders from Berlin, grenadiers searched the grounds soon after the bombing ceased; they found the abbey’s outer walls battered but not breached at ground level. As Clark had foretold, Senger promptly ordered his troops to burrow into the rubble. Machine guns nested in the masonry, artillery observers perched on the broken ramparts, and a field kitchen opened in Benedict’s cell.
Not until dawn on Thursday did Abbot Diamare lead the remnants of his flock out of the ruins. Forty monks and refugees emerged from the abbey’s arched entryway, still intact with the inscription PAX carved in the stone lintel above the great oak door. A monk holding a large wooden crucifix led the procession down the serpentine road from one hairpin curve to another. A paralyzed boy rode on a monk’s shoulders, and the old woman without feet was carried on a ladder until the burden grew too great and she was laid on the mountainside to die. Down they trudged, past yawning craters gouged in the roadbed and the rocky knob of Monte Venere, now called Hangman’s Hill because the wrecked funicular tower resembled a gibbet. Down, down the procession wound toward the seething valley, as the old abbot and his monks mumbled the rosary in contemplation of God’s deepest mysteries, the joyful and the luminous, the glorious and the sorrowful.