by Mark Zuehlke
Few tourists pause to overnight in the modern town of Cassino. The buses, en route to or from the autostrada to the abbey, hasten by Cassino’s western outskirts, carrying their passengers to lunch in some quainter, more “Italian” community. Unlike the abbey, Cassino was not reconstructed. It was instead built anew, shifted two kilometres so that it stands on the narrow valley plain through which the Gari River flows, rather than on the lower slopes of Monte Cassino. At first glance, Cassino seems stark, even grim. Most of the buildings are made of featureless concrete, streets are choked with cars, and sidewalks are narrow. There are few trattorias or ristorantes, but many pizzerias and cafés. There is also, outside the train station, a rusty Mark IV tank, its front end crawling up onto some large white stone rubble blocks, as if it still wants a fight. There is a similarly rusted, but not so aggressive, Sherman tank and antitank gun in the square outside city hall. Several stores sell black-and-white postcards that show the pleasant town Cassino once was. Some of the postcards are of the rubble after, and others capture scenes of soldiers locked in battle. In one, two American GIs lean toward each other. One is pointing dramatically toward the summit of Monte Cassino where exploding bombs throw debris and flame several hundred metres into the air above the ruins of the abbey. The photo was taken on February 15, 1944 — the day the abbey perished.
Although Cassino today bears no resemblance to the town it was before it became the most destroyed community in Italy during World War II, there are few of its former residents left to remember. Most of its current citizens did not have family here before the war. They came after, many as refugees from other war-torn parts of Italy. Finding a ruin, they reclaimed it, just as they made new lives for themselves.
I spend a week in Cassino, coming to see behind the plain façade a town and people that have their own unique charm and grace. The people are shy, even reticent at first when they hear I have come to write about the war. Gradually, however, they open up, becoming friendly and sincerely interested in my work. Ask if they know anyone who lived here or in the other towns of the Liri Valley during the war, though, and most can only shrug. It was a long time ago. They left. They were all killed. There was an uncle, but he is dead now. There is an old fellow in San Angelo, but nobody remembers his name. There is Federico Lamberti at the bookstore. And so there is.
Federico was nine in May 1944 and, although he had many uncles and aunts in Cassino, he lived in Atina, a smaller town set in the foothills north of Cassino. He was the fourth of five children. His father, Michael, also owned a bookshop. Michael Lamberti was born in England, hence the anglicized name, but his parents moved to Atina when he was a teenager. In December 1943, the Germans came and brought the war with them to the town. Federico’s family fled to Arpino, east of Frosinone, but the war followed. So they walked into the mountains to a place north of Monte Cairo. Here they found a shepherd’s hut and remained there until the fighting passed by. From their lofty perch, the family watched the month-long battle for the Liri Valley. Mostly, they followed the ebb and flow of the Allies’ fortunes by where the artillery and aerial bombardments struck.
When the Allies advanced so far west that much of the valley was no longer subject to shelling or bombing, the Lambertis returned to Atina on June 2, 1944. They found 99 percent of the town demolished. That was significantly better than Cassino. There, every building had been destroyed. Nobody went near Cassino at the time, Federico says. There were too many mines and unexploded shells in the rubble and surrounding fields. Much of the ground had been flooded, transformed into malarial swamps. It was years before anyone started to rebuild Cassino. When they did, there were shortages of concrete and steel. Brick was impossible to find. Construction equipment was also in short supply.
Federico and I walk around Cassino and he points out sights that few tourists would ever hear of. There is the two-storey concrete commercial building that has a German tank serving as part of its foundation. The builders were unable to wrench the wreck out of the cellar in which it had been positioned, so they poured concrete over and around it and its steel became the footing for a section of their building. There is an overgrown and nearly collapsed tunnel at the base of Monte Cassino where a German railroad gun was hidden and trundled out periodically to fire massive shells toward the Allied line.
We drive in the chaotic Italian manner to San Angelo and Federico points out the position where Tony Kingsmill’s Plymouth Bridge was put over the Gari River on the night of May 11–12. East of the river, there are wide-open fields, which in fall lie fallow and deeply ploughed, but by May will be thick with tall grain dotted with poppies.
Federico, a slight, intense, bespectacled, and chain-smoking man, has spent much of his life studying the battles for Cassino and the Liri Valley. He confesses, however, to knowing little about the Canadians’ role. Plymouth Bridge he knows; that’s about all. He never met a Canadian soldier until many years after the war, when a veteran came to his bookshop in Cassino. The man had worked on Plymouth Bridge and it is he who directed Federico to the site. No, he does not remember the man’s name. It was not the bridge’s architect, who never returned to the Liri Valley.
This is true of most of the Canadians who fought there. And those who have returned confess to passing through the Liri Valley quickly, usually without looking, in the manner of veterans, for remembered places of battle or positions of bivouacs. This is understandable. The Liri Valley of today, or even of twenty years ago, little resembles the place in which they fought and buried comrades. Where the Hitler Line was a massive Fiat auto-manufacturing plant has erased most traces of the fortifications. Many of the residents of Cassino work at the plant and it is the greatest source of the valley’s surging prosperity. An ever-widening autostrada linking Naples to Rome slashes up the valley, and cloverleaf exits and entry ramps abound. Yet, not far from the autostrada, I see an old farmer bent to a plough being pulled by a large white ox. He prods it on with soft trills. The old and new in Italy seem always to reach some amiable form of accommodation.
The other towns in the Liri Valley, such as Pontecorvo, Ceprano, and Aquino, fared little better than Cassino. A few old churches survive and have been repaired, as have some other buildings. But there are few traces of battle in their streets. In Ortona and out in its surrounding countryside, I saw buildings still pocked and pitted from bullets and shrapnel. Some had roofs collapsed in the telltale manner caused by a direct hit from an artillery shell. Nothing like that here.
There remains one prominent reminder of the terrible fighting that went on in the Liri Valley — the graves of soldiers. On Monte Cassino, the Polish cemetery holds 1,000 graves, including that of General Wladyslaw Anders, who was interred here among his fallen comrades after his death in London in 1970. Anders, who, like his men, fought for a free Poland, lived out his life as an expatriate from a nation held under the Soviet fist. He believed that the western Allies betrayed the Polish soldiers who fought at their side in the expectation that Poland’s national independence would be guaranteed. He was right in that.
North of Cassino, near the village of Caira, is a graveyard holding 20,057 dead Germans. Not all of these died in the Liri Valley. Many were brought here after the war from smaller graves scattered across Italy. At Venafro, on the other side of the valley, 3,414 French soldiers lie. The Americans interred their Cassino dead, alongside those who fell at Anzio, in Nettuno. There are 7,862 graves there and a memorial for 3,094 missing. Just south of Highway 6, outside Cassino, is the British and Commonwealth cemetery. It holds 4,266 graves with a memorial commemorating 4,054 missing. The Canadians are mostly buried together in one section of the cemetery. Between the ordered marble rows of tombstones grows carefully tended grass. Bright flowers are interspersed between the headstones. In the distance stands Monte Cassino, with the white monolithic structure of the abbey clearly visible.
The dates on the Canadian headstones retell the story of the battle fought. May 23 stands out. I find 138 headstones of men wh
o died that day. Most served in the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade. A few headstones bear not one but several names. One entire Three Rivers Regiment tank crew shares the same grave — a stark reminder of what happens when a tank explodes and burns. The epitaphs on many headstones tell another tale, that of the struggle by families to come to terms with the deaths of men who were so young and so far away. Private Arthur Edgar Harris of Calgary was older than many. He died at thirty-one. His epitaph reads: “Died that fascism/Be destroyed/and that workers/might build a new world.” Lance Corporal George Amos was also thirty-one and his family asked: “Went the day well?/He died and never knew/well or ill/Freedom, he died for you.” Private John Wallace’s headstone reads: “Sometime we’ll meet/and understand/Mother and Dad.” He was twenty-seven on May 23 when he breathed his last breath. Trooper Cyril Fairhead’s age is not recorded on his headstone, but I find his epitaph deeply moving: “I cannot say/and I will not say/That he is dead/He is just away.”
Went the day well? A difficult question when one ponders the course of the Liri Valley battle and Canada’s role there. In the end, it was a victory. But it was a victory won at a tragically high price in men killed and men wounded. Could the price have been less? Canadian historians and professional soldiers rarely debate this. Not because the issue is unimportant; rather because the Battle of the Liri Valley is undoubtedly the most forgotten of the large battles Canadians fought in World War II. Ortona, a smaller battle, has recently emerged from the darkness to capture some of its rightful place in the collective Canadian consciousness. The 1998 and 1999 Christmas dinner reconciliation meetings of veteran German and Canadian soldiers at Ortona played a role in renewing interest in that battle, but it is unlikely that such an event will ever commemorate the Liri Valley battle.
I find when talking to veterans of this battle, as was not true for those who fought at Ortona, that the events of May are often poorly remembered, if at all. Everything happened so quickly, they often say. And the memories that stuck were hard ones to carry. The burials of the dead after May 23. The cries of men as they burned inside their Shermans. A man unexpectedly finding his brother’s grave. “The Hitler Line was the worst day of my life,” says one veteran. “Ortona was nothing compared to it. I never expected to live through it.” Another stares almost vacantly into space as he clearly and vividly recounts lying on the bank of the Melfa River, while Major John Mahony rushed back and forth through the bullets and shrapnel during the Westminster Regiment’s stand there. He ends the tale by saying, “We lined twenty-three of our dead up on the river’s edge the next morning. It was heartbreaking to see.”
In the Liri Valley battle, the Canadians in Italy lost the belief that individually they had much of a future. The veterans, who came ashore in Sicily and had fought through and survived Ortona, lost many comrades in May 1944 — far more than at any other time in past battles. It was harder after May to believe they would survive the inevitable coming battles. For 5th Canadian Armoured Division’s regiments and the new recruits posted to the more seasoned regiments, the fighting in May was shocking. How could they hope to live through many more days like these? One man tells me that he joined his regiment on May 22. His first day in battle was at the Hitler Line and he was in the Edmonton regiment. It was weeks before he realized how extraordinarily terrible and unique that day’s fighting had been.
When he learned finally that battles are interspersed with long periods of tedium, the man felt better able to cope and hoped, just maybe, he would live to the end of the war. Until then, he had expected, at any moment, to die. But he also knew that there was no end in sight and that there would be many more, and possibly even worse, battles. The road the Canadians marched in Italy was a long one. In May 1944, they were but halfway down it. When they marched out of the Liri Valley, few bothered to look back at the ruined land behind them. They marched toward an uncertain future and the Liri Valley battle slipped into obscurity, where it still remains.
APPENDIX A
EIGHTH ARMY ORDER
OF BATTLE
X Corps
(Lieutenant General Sir R.L. McCreery)
2nd New Zealand Infantry Division
24th Guards Brigade
12th South African Motor Brigade
Hermon Force
Corps of Italian Liberation
26th British Armoured Brigade
2nd Army Group Royal Artillery
XIII Corps
(Lieutenant General S.C. Kirkman)
6th British Armoured Division
4th British Infantry Division
78th British Infantry Division
8th Indian Infantry Division
1st Canadian Armoured Brigade
6th Army Group Royal Artillery
1st Canadian Army Group Royal
Canadian Artillery
I Canadian Corps
(Lieutenant General E.L.M. Burns)
5th Canadian Armoured Division
1st Canadian Infantry Division
25th Royal Tank Brigade
II Polish Corps
(Lieutenant General W. Anders)
3rd Carpathian Infantry Division
5th Kresowa Infantry Division
2nd Polish Armoured Brigade
Army Group Polish Artillery
6th South African Armoured Division
11th African Armoured Brigade
12th Anti-Aircraft Brigade
APPENDIX B
CANADIANS AT THE LIRI VALLEY
(NOT ALL UNITS LISTED)
1st Canadian Corps
1 Canadian Armoured Car Regiment
(Royal Canadian Dragoons)
7th Anti-Tank Regiment
No. 1 Army Group, RCA
1st Survey Regiment
11th Army Field Regiment
1st Medium Regiment
2nd Medium Regiment
5th Medium Regiment
1st Canadian Infantry Division
4th Reconnaissance Regiment
(Princess Louise Dragoon Guards)
The Royal Canadian Artillery:
1st Field Regiment
(Royal Canadian Horse Artillery)
2nd Field Regiment
3rd Field Regiment
1st Anti-tank Regiment
2nd Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment
Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers:
1st Field Company
3rd Field Company
4th Field Company
2nd Field Park Company
Brigade Support Group:
The Saskatoon Light Infantry
1st Canadian Infantry Brigade:
The Royal Canadian Regiment
(permanent force)
The Hastings and Prince Edward
Regiment
48th Highlanders of Canada Regiment
2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade:
Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light
Infantry Regiment (permanent force)
Seaforth Highlanders of Canada
Regiment
Loyal Edmonton Regiment
3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade:
Royal 22e Regiment (permanent force)
Carleton and York Regiment
West Nova Scotia Regiment
5th Canadian Armoured Division
Motorized Troops
Westminster (Motorized) Regiment
Reconnaissance Troops
3rd Canadian Armoured
Reconnaissance Regiment
(Governor General’s Horse Guards)
Brigade Support Group:
Princess Louise Fusiliers
The Royal Canadian Artillery:
17th Field Regiment
8th Field Regiment (Self-Propelled)
4th Anti-tank Regiment
5th Light Anti-tank Regiment
5th Canadian Armoured Brigade
2nd Canadian Armoured Regiment
(Lord Strathcona’s Horse)
(permanent force)
5th Canadian Armoured Regiment
(8th Princess Louise New Brunswick Hussars)
9th Canadian Armoured Regiment
(British Columbia Dragoons)
11th Canadian Infantry Brigade
Perth Regiment
Cape Breton Highlanders
Irish Regiment of Canada
Corps of Royal Canadian Engineers
1st Field Squadron
4th Field Park Squadron
10th Field Squadron
1st Canadian Armoured Brigade
11th Canadian Armoured Regiment
(Ontario Tanks)
12th Canadian Armoured Regiment
(Three Rivers Tanks)
14th Canadian Armoured Regiment
(Calgary Tanks)
APPENDIX C
CANADIAN INFANTRY BATTALION
(TYPICAL ORGANIZATION)
HQ Company
No. 1: Signals Platoon
No. 2: Administrative Platoon
Support Company
No. 3: Mortar Platoon (3 inch)
No. 4: Bren Carrier Platoon
No. 5: Assault Pioneer Platoon
No. 6: Antitank Platoon (6 pounder)
A Company
No. 7 Platoon
No. 8 Platoon
No. 9 Platoon
B Company
No. 10 Platoon
No. 11 Platoon
No. 12 Platoon
C Company
No. 13 Platoon
No. 14 Platoon
No. 15 Platoon
D Company
No. 16 Platoon
No. 17 Platoon
No. 18 Platoon
APPENDIX D
CANADIAN MILITARY ORDER OF RANK
Private (Pte.)
Gunner (artillery equivalent of private) Trooper (armoured equivalent of private)
Lance Corporal (L/Cpl.)
Corporal (Cpl.)
Lance Sergeant (L/Sgt.)