World War II Behind Closed Doors by Laurence Rees

four separate operations in their attempt to take Monte Cassino. The first predated the bombing of the monastery by a month. On 17 January British troops from X Corps had crossed the Garigliano river on the left of the battle front, and were then supported by a crossing of the Rapido river made by the American 36th Division in the centre. Both actions failed. A combination of bad weather, lack of armoured support, difficult terrain and powerful German counter-attacks forced the Allies back. Subsequent fighting in the hills alongside Monte Cassino was just as ineffective, and the attack was called off before the bombing raid. The Allied attackers suffered much greater losses than the German defenders – one American Division, for example, with more than two thousand casualties lost about 80 per cent of its fighting strength. 67
    The second attempt to capture Monte Cassino, mounted in the days immediately after the bombing, was no better. Units of the Royal Sussex Regiment, the Rajputana Rifles and the Gurkhas all tried to dislodge the Germans, but to little effect. Similarly the third battle, launched on 15 March and involving New Zealand troops among others, was also a failure. The German defenders – notably the 1st Parachute Division, described by British Commander General Alexander as ‘the best Division in the German Army’ 68 – had held firm. Joseph Klein was a member of this ‘elite’ group ‘formed from the soldiers that had been in Crete and then in Russia’. And he believes that one of the greatest – andmost obvious – advantages the Germans possessed was the power of their defensive positions: ‘I thought: “What nonsense!” How can you send people up this mountain [to attack] — 45 degrees steep! So we often asked ourselves why they chose that way…. They always attacked on the broadest side and on the most impossible terrain’.
    The final attempt to capture Monte Cassino was made in May 1944. The delay of nearly two months between the third and fourth assault had allowed the Allies time to benefit from better weather and to prepare a larger and wider military operation against the German line. This time the task of disabling Monte Cassino fell to the 2nd Polish Corps under the command of Lieutenant General Władysław Anders. They were ordered to ‘isolate’ the monastery by attacking the heavily defended mountains alongside. Anders immediately understood that for the Poles this attempt to capture the ‘Monte Cassino heights’ would be more than just a military operation: ‘I realised that the cost in lives must be heavy, but I realised too the importance of the capture of Monte Cassino to the Allied cause, and most of all to that of Poland, for it would answer once and for all the Soviet lie that the Poles did not want to fight the Germans. Victory would give new courage to the resistance movement in Poland and would cover Polish arms with glory. After a moment's reflection I answered that I would undertake the task’. 69
    On 11 May Polish troops mounted their first attack on Monte Cassino as part of the overall Allied offensive on the Gustav Line. For the men of Anders' army it was, as Wiesław Wolwowicz 70 describes it, ‘a christening of fire’. Wolwowicz, then a twenty-two-year-old junior officer in the 16th Lwów Rifle Battalion, had come on a typically lengthy and circuitous journey to be here in Italy. In the autumn of 1939 he had been captured by the Soviets just outside Lwów while trying to escape westwards to join the Polish Army. After interrogation by the NKVD in the notorious Brigidki prison in Lwów he was taken by train to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1940 where he was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and confined in a camp in the Ural Mountains. After somemonths cutting trees in the forest as a forced labourer, he was released following the German invasion of the Soviet Union and joined Anders's army. He subsequently left the Soviet Union as part of