Never in his legendary career had he faced “so difficult an operation,” Freyberg admitted in early March. The newly arriving commander of XIII Corps, Lieutenant General Sidney C. Kirkman, found Freyberg “very gloomy about the proposed attack” and furious at Clark, who, he complained, had “no ideas except to launch a succession of attacks regardless of casualties.”
Unknown to Freyberg, Kirkman carried a note from the Eighth Army commander, General Leese, authorizing him to take command from Freyberg “if I saw fit.” After several long conversations with the New Zealander, Kirkman chose to keep the warrant in his pocket, not least because Freyberg “would have been most annoyed and humiliated.” But Operation DICKENS, he warned Leese on March 4, would likely gain little and cost much. The ground was too boggy for a sprightly advance and Allied reserves too meager to exploit any rupture in the Gustav Line.
The ground grew boggier: rain fell for a third week. Each evening, as twilight’s gray tint faded to black in the west, the ravines and mountain roads leaped to life. Quartermasters hurried forward with supplies stacked in the beds of their grinding trucks, the cat’s-eye blackout lights creeping up the muddy inclines until the track grew too steep or the enemy too bold. Swaying mule trains clopped behind the ridgelines, moving no quicker than a mile per hour despite whispered exhortations from the skinners; each animal could lug eighteen mortar rounds or an equivalent load, and a report from the front observed that “the mules are tranquil during shell fire, the Italian mule leaders are not.” Only men could scale the steepest slopes, and panting bearers trudged toward the forward outposts with water cans and ammo belts lashed to their packboards, every ear cocked for the whine of a sniper’s bullet or the telltale pumpf! of a mortar shell leaving its tube.
At dawn the landscape again grew still except for greasy smoke spiraling from one detonation or another. German ambulances rolled down Highway 6 with impunity until observers spied armed troops climbing from the rear; Kiwi artillery sent the next one fishtailing back up the Liri Valley. Careless enemy soldiers risked the frustrated wrath of the entire Fifth Army: a gunner on Monte Trocchio reported that when a solitary German strayed from his hole in Cassino town one morning “he was engaged by a holocaust of fire, including that of 8-inch howitzers.”
At seven A.M. on Wednesday, March 15, Clark and Gruenther left the Fifth Army command post in Presenzano and drove by jeep past Monte Lungo to Freyberg’s headquarters near San Pietro. Captain Ludlum had at last delivered good news. His Tuesday night forecast reported that a “frontal system over France yesterday morning has moved rapidly south-eastward” to provide perfect bombing weather in Italy for the ides: sunshine, dead calm, a few thin clouds. The long-awaited warning order, drawn from cricket terms, was broadcast to all units: “Bradman will be batting tomorrow.” Troops closest to Cassino crept back a thousand yards.
After a brief stop in the New Zealand encampment, Clark and Gruenther pressed ahead in a cavalcade that sped through Purple Heart Valley and past the rubble once known as San Pietro. Operation LUDLUM had attracted an eager crowd, including Devers, Eaker, Keyes, and Freyberg. Alexander appeared from Caserta in his own jeep with a gaggle of reporters in tow. Dressed in his fleece-lined jacket and red cap, he appeared as “calm, detached and attractive as usual,” one admirer wrote; in a letter to his three children a few days earlier, Alexander had sketched a child in a nightshirt watching a hag with a pointed hat sail past on her broom. “So,” the caption read, “there are witches after all!”
Before reaching Monte Trocchio, the convoy turned right to climb through San Vittore to the hill town of Cervaro. Clark followed a Kiwi officer into the decrepit stone house that would serve as his grandstand. After scanning the valley with his field glasses from a second-floor balcony, Clark climbed to the roof and straddled the ridgepole, his long legs dangling over the eaves. Three miles due west across the Rapido flats lay Cassino: the four churches, the four hotels, the botanical garden, the jail, all gleaming in the morning sun, all doomed.
He hardly cared. As of Tuesday, Fifth Army comprised 438,782 soldiers—205,000 Americans, 172,000 British, 49,000 French, 12,000 Italians—and to each of them Clark felt responsible for breaking the stalemate in Italy by whatever means necessary. The rain, the casualties, the internecine bickering, the impasse at Anzio, the brouhaha over the abbey—all had worn him down, even as the long winter made him harder, more obdurate. Every visit to a ward full of wounded boys left him “very depressed.” When a sympathetic admiral wrote to remind Clark that “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,” he replied, “Chastening already ample. Surely time has come to spare the rod.” In early March he told Renie:
I know you are upset about the Italian situation, and so am I, but there is nothing I can do about it except continue to do my duty…. You must look upon this Italian campaign as one little part of a world war where perhaps we do something the hard way in order to make successes in other places easier.
If broad-gauged and resolute, with what he described as “a keen and abiding interest in the little problems” of his men, he could also be pinched and querulous. To Geoff Keyes on Monday he had mused aloud about personally taking command at the Anzio beachhead. The feckless Lucas was gone, but Clark found Truscott “a difficult subordinate to handle. He makes demands, knowing full well that many of them can not be granted.” Yet it was the British who annoyed him most. “I am convinced that Alexander is floundering in his effort to solve the tactical situation here,” Clark told his war diary on March 8. Even Churchill seemed bent on provoking him from afar: an AFHQ staff officer reported that “all dispatches sent personally to the prime minister should spell ‘theater’ ‘t-h-e-a-t-r-e’ and should not spell ‘through’ ‘t-h-r-u.’” When Churchill in early March ordered that troops at Anzio be known as the “Allied Bridgehead Force,” Clark in a note to Alexander counterproposed “the Fifth Army Allied Bridgehead Force.” He confessed in his diary to being “greatly annoyed,” then added, “This is part of the steady effort by the British to increase their prestige.”
For Clark, too, there were witches after all. Ever more convinced that others conspired to steal his thunder and deprive Fifth Army of battle honors fairly won, he struggled to keep his equilibrium against stress, exhaustion, pride, and insecurity. Only when he stood triumphant as an American pro-consul in Rome would the world see that the sacrifices from Salerno to Cassino were justified. A gifted soldier, with a brain big enough and a spine stiff enough to wage the total war required in 1944, Mark Clark at times seemed to battle his own demons as bitterly as he fought the Germans.
A few days earlier he had mailed Renie a brooch set with red, white, and blue stones to form the Fifth Army insignia; it matched the three-star earrings she sometimes wore. “My problems get no less worrisome as the days go on,” he confided in the accompanying note. “However, things will work out, and I am waiting for the day when I can lead my Fifth Army into victory.”
At precisely 8:30 A.M., a faint sound overhead broke Clark’s reverie. “Into the silence obtruded a drone, no louder than the buzz of a bee, but becoming louder by the second,” wrote a British sapper. Heads swiveled, glasses glinted. Swarms of B-25 medium bombers appeared from the east at seven thousand feet, escorted by fighters. As the formation approached Cassino, the planes banked to the left. Bomb bays blinked open like a hundred dark eyes.
“The object of the attack,” each flight crew had been told, “is to accomplish complete reduction of Cassino town.” To terrorize German defenders, the lead squadrons were advised to “attach whistling devices”—known as screamers—“to as many bombs as practicable.” The planes carried only thousand-pound blockbusters, with fuses set to detonate at basement depth: .1 seconds after impact in the nose and .025 seconds in the tail. Bombardiers had no aim points other than a quarter-mile radius around Cassino’s heart. Medium bombers—the B-25 Mitchells and B-26 Marauders—were to strike the northern hemisphere, known as “A,” while the heavies—the B-24 Liberators and B
-17 Flying Fortresses—would hit the southern sector, “B.” No Luftwaffe fighters appeared, and only a few flak blossoms blemished the cerulean sky.
The screamers screamed. Cassino abruptly vanished. “Sprout after sprout of black smoke leapt from the earth and curled upward like some dark forest,” wrote Christopher Buckley. From Clark’s ridgepole—it shuddered and swayed as each distant stick detonated—the first eight hundred bombs seemed to swallow the town in smoke and flame. “Target cabbaged real good,” a crewman in the lead bomber reported. Soon after the first mediums flew off, Fortresses appeared, then more mediums, then more heavies, alternating between sector A and sector B.
“After a few minutes, I felt like shouting that’s enough,” wrote a Gurkha officer dug into a spur behind Monte Cassino. “But it went on and on until our ear drums were bursting and our senses were befuddled.” Between bomb payloads, nearly nine hundred guns fired artillery concentrations code-named LENTIL, TROTSKY, and, improbably, GANDHI.
For more than three hours, the squadrons appeared at ten-to-twenty-minute intervals. Some bombs drifted into 4th Indian Division positions, provoking an adjutant’s cry over the radio, “Stop those damn maniacs!” Even Freyberg was struck by the “terrible one-sidedness of the spectacle.” But Buckley, who had been in Warsaw on September 1, 1939, wrote, “I remember from the evidence of my own eyes who was responsible for letting loose this terrible weapon.”
At 12:12 P.M., as the last B-26 flew from sight, a lone P-38 swooped across Cassino, snapping reconnaissance photographs. They revealed buildings reduced to exoskeletons, a gray hive of door lintels and window frames, with the “peaks of broken buildings still standing, but the overall landscape only a misshapen pile of rubble.” Cassino, the Army Air Forces reported, was “as flat as a stone city can be.” The photos also showed that many craters already had begun to fill with groundwater.
Into the afternoon the artillery continued, six shells per second sweeping that piled rubble until nearly 200,000 rounds had fallen on the town and adjacent hills. Two New Zealand Corps divisions prepared to surge forward, the 2nd New Zealand through the town and the 4th Indian across Monte Cassino’s flanks. Clark left his rooftop, strode half a mile down the road toward the town for a closer look, then circled back to other observation posts in Cervaro before once again dangling his legs over the eaves of his stone house. Alexander kept watch until two P.M. “Nothing,” he declared, “could still be alive in the town.” Eaker, keen to help Hap Arnold in the sacred quest for Air Force independence, publicly announced, “Today we fumigated Cassino and I am most hopeful when the smoke of today’s battle clears we shall find more worthy occupants installed with little loss to our men.”
He should have known better. Even before the bomb runs ended it was evident that more than a few payloads had fallen wide. At 10:15 A.M., several dozen Liberators plastered Venafro—eleven miles from Cassino. Six bombs hit the town and others splattered across an adjacent mountain. At 10:30, another Liberator group struck Venafro, followed by yet another at 11:25. Bombs battered General Juin’s headquarters, killing fifteen French soldiers and wounding thirty others. More bombs hit the Eighth Army command post in a glade near Venafro, ripping open a mess hut and sending staff officers diving beneath their desks. “Ah,” said General Leese upon returning to his headquarters, “I see our American friends have called.” In an icy phone call to Clark, Leese said, “Tell me, as a matter of interest, is there anything we’ve done to offend you recently?”
Other bombs fell on the 4th Indian Division, the 3rd Algerian Division, a Moroccan military hospital, and a Polish bivouac. In a dozen incidents of imprecision during a two-hour period, nearly 100 Allied soldiers died and another 250 were wounded; in Venafro alone as many as 75 civilians were killed. Of 2,366 bombs dropped in LUDLUM, more than 300 were jettisoned or aimed at the wrong target. Less than half the total payload landed within a mile of central Cassino, while fewer than one bomb in ten struck inside the thousand-yard radius of sectors A and B.
Investigators found that flight leaders had flown no previous reconnaissance of the area. Some commanders treated LUDLUM too casually; heavy bomber crews, accustomed to hitting targets deep in enemy territory, often lacked the finesse required for a target tucked among friendly forces. Fifteenth Air Force also permitted bomber groups to select their own altitudes, and most flew too high despite the lack of enemy opposition. In the 459th Bomb Group, a malfunction in Liberator Dog 1-2 caused four bombs to drop prematurely; three other planes followed suit, despite orders to salvo their bombs only when the flight leader did. Similar violations in other groups “precipitated a contagious release throughout the entire attack unit.” Through inexperience and “careless navigation,” aircrews mistook Venafro, Isernia, Pozzilli, Montaquila, and Cervaro for Cassino. To make matters worse, the bombardier in a B-24H could not see the planes in front release their bombs and therefore relied on a bombs-away signal—usually a sharp kick in the back—from the navigator peering through a window. Clark and his fellow brass hats were fortunate not to fall in with the fratricidal dead.
Eaker and Devers favored prosecuting fourteen Air Force lieutenants, most of them bombardiers. Courts-martial proceedings began after an investigative report found “negligence, or at least poor judgment on the part of the accused”; yet the investigating officer, Brigadier General Joseph H. Atkinson, also recommended clemency for the airmen, whose average age was twenty-three. Charges subsequently were dropped against all but two lieutenants, who later went missing on subsequent missions.
“Let these young officers get on with the war,” General Atkinson advised. “There is a lesson for all to learn from this very unfortunate incident.”
Freyberg’s intelligence had assumed that a thousand 1st Parachute Division soldiers occupied Cassino, but in fact only three hundred or so happened to be in the town when the first bomb fell. Thousands more held fortifications on Monte Cassino, Point 593, and neighboring slopes. Known as the Green Devils for the hue of their uniforms, the division’s three regiments were considered the most formidable German troops in the Mediterranean. German paratroopers had fought ferociously against the New Zealanders on Crete in 1941, and against the Canadians at Ortona in December. After heavy losses in the winter campaign, replacements had nearly brought the division back to scratch under the portly, cigar-smoking Major General Richard Heidrich. Of Heidrich a 4th Indian Division assessment later concluded, “He was ruthless and not overnice.”
Roughly half the paratroopers caught in Cassino on Wednesday morning outlived the day, and they described a maelstrom unlike anything experienced before or after. Explosions tossed men about like “scraps of paper,” entombing them in cellars and tunnels. “We could no longer see each other,” a German lieutenant recalled. “All we could do was to touch and feel the next man. The blackness of night enveloped us and on our tongues was the taste of burnt earth.” To another lieutenant, “We were just like a submarine crew whose U-boat was being pursued by depth charges.” Artillery fire proved especially devastating to German gun batteries, quickly destroying eighty-nine of ninety-four tubes in one regiment. The stench of decaying corpses soon seeped from Cassino’s broken stones as it did from the abbey above; one sergeant thought the very dust tasted of bone. “The men clung to one another as if we were one lump of flesh,” he said. “There was nothing we could do except weep and rage.” A Feldwebel who was later captured told interrogators that the Allied bombardment was so unnerving that his men were forbidden to discuss it. “Speak about women, or anything else,” he said, “but not about Cassino.”
The town was “blown asunder and beaten into heaps of rubble,” the official British history reported. Yet hundreds of bombs and thousands of shells failed to pound the town to powder, contrary to Allied expectations, nor were the surviving defenders “rendered comatose,” as planned. A subsequent Air Force analysis found that although roofs and upper floors were obliterated, just south of the Hotel Continental “two rows of houses remain
intact as to first floors and cellars,” preserved by stout masonry arches and domed ceilings. The Continental’s basement also survived, along with various “immensely solid” cellars, dugouts, caves, and a long tunnel from the Roman coliseum to Castle Hill. Munitions specialists later concluded that the .025-second tail fuses caused bombs to detonate just after punching through Cassino roofs; better to have set a slower fuse to penetrate deeper into the buildings, and to have followed them with incendiary bombs that would have ignited splintered floor timbers and smoked out any survivors. Other paratroopers survived in steel, bell-shaped bunkers designed for two men but into which as many as six squeezed during the attack. “Bombs falling three to four yards from a pillbox lifted it out of its position without seriously harming the men inside,” a prisoner later reported.
Under orders from Vietinghoff’s Tenth Army, General von Senger told Heidrich to stand fast. The paratrooper commander eagerly agreed, convinced that he held an impregnable redoubt. Heidrich believed, he later said, that “Cassino was so ideally situated from a defensive standpoint that no frontal attack could have succeeded.” Dust-caked paratroopers dug out of the rubble, stood to arms, then dug back in to prepare for the inevitable Allied assault. Sappers shored up the sagging ceilings in cellars around the Continental. The conversion of Cassino from crossroads market town to stand-or-die citadel was complete.