Tuker was an unusual man. Intense, introspective, artistic, scholarly and devoted to India, Indians, his service, his division and his men, he was a very different personality from Freyberg, but the two had in common devotion to their men and an obstinate determination to save life if possible. Both were obsessive about their commands and tended to do too much themselves. Together, they represented what Clark and other senior Americans liked least about the British service, its paternalism and its refusal to accept casualties.
Unfortunately Tuker, prostrated by arthritis, was unfit to command but unwilling to hand over to his deputy, his artillery commander, Brigadier H. W. Dimoline, a Territorial officer. Tuker remained brooding in his command caravan, giving advice from time to time. Dimoline also listened to two of his brigade commanders, O. de T. Lovett of the 7th Brigade, who played the main role in AVENGER, and the strong-willed A. Galloway of the 5th Brigade who was predominant in DICKENS. In effect, the division was commanded by a committee; always a recipe for failure, militating against the speed and boldness which were essential if Clark’s aim to break out towards Anzio was to be attained. It was not, however, the only factor operating against it.
* Equivalent to the German Soldaten Treue.
12
A HATEFUL TAPESTRY IN THE SKY
Earth opens where the squandered bombs fall wide
And all our view’s a burning countryside.
Only the sudden metal weight of fear
Brings back the platitude that life is dear,
Keeps us awake while we sit staring out
With Reason pounding, “what’s it all about?”
Denton Welch, 1915–48
The stage was now set for the Second Battle of Montecassino, a bloody fiasco, whose central incident, the destruction by air bombardment of Montecassino, reverberates to this day. The planning of the battle is a complicated story of accidents, of misunderstandings piled on misunderstandings, of complicated and conflicting evidence, and of suppressed evidence. The proceedings of a court of enquiry would run to a whole volume; indeed, volumes have already been written on the subject. Here we attempt only to provide an account of events in the order they took place, using some sources so far neglected.1
When General Clark at last decided to commit the New Zealand Corps his intention was to use it to preserve the momentum of the US 2nd Corps attack from the general direction of the Snakeshead and Point 593 on to Montecassino.2 Essentially the mission of the 4th Indian Division was to thrust through the American positions in two directions with the aim of cutting the Via Casilina; southward past the Monastery and down the mountain slopes into the town of Cassino, and from M. Castellone to Villa S. Lucia. At the same time the 2nd New Zealand Division was to establish a bridgehead over the Rapido in the town, link up with the Indians and drive through into the Liri valley. There was to be no regular “take-over” from the US 34th and 36th Divisions on the heights: the Indians were simply to form up behind the forward American positions and attack through them. For various reasons this proved impractical. The New Zealand attack was delayed by the Rapido river bursting its banks in the winter rains and flooding all the approaches, so that the route to Cassino was temporarily impassable to infantry and tanks. The US troops on the heights had shot their bolt, were paralysed by exposure and fatigue, and the arrival of the leading battalions of the 4th Indian Division, delayed by Clark’s late decision to commit them there, coincided with the spoiling counter-attack called MICHAEL which the Germans had seized the opportunity to launch.
The terrible muddles which attended the mounting of the battle can be accounted for partly by the unwieldy command structure. The general in effective command was Clark, who was trying to control two widely separated operations at once – the battle for the Anzio bridgehead, which by mid-February was reaching a crisis and demanded all his attention, and Cassino. Above him was Alexander, and above him again Maitland Wilson, and his air commander, General Ira C. Eaker, USAAF, Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, who were to become involved in negotiations to provide air support. Clark’s plan, avoiding a straight takeover, superimposed one corps upon another from different armies with different command procedures. The New Zealand Corps HQ was an ad hoc affair, without a proper staff, trained and accustomed to working as a team. Both its divisions were commanded by deputies. Howard Kippenberger, an outstanding infantry officer, substituted for Freyberg, who commanded the corps. Brigadier Dimoline, acting divisional commander, was a talented artillery officer, but not the man to drive a team of battle-hardened infantry brigadiers from so famous a division, or to stand up to the formidable Bernard Freyberg, VC.
To explain the course of events we have to unravel two interwoven skeins. One is the planning sequence for the battle on the heights, the other the great debate about how to deal with the Monastery, the great fortress-like building sitting four-square on Montecassino – the “hateful tapestry in the sky”, as the New Zealand official historian called it, rather fancifully. All soldiers hate being overlooked by the enemy, and from Tuker and Freyberg down they were convinced that from its superbly commanding position the enemy was watching their every move. In fact, General Frido von Senger, a devout Catholic and a highly civilised man, had put it out of bounds to all German troops, except wounded in an emergency, but nobody was to know that, and the Americans had already, and correctly, located enemy positions on the slopes close beneath its walls. When Tuker, still in his HQ but on his sick-bed, learnt that his division was to assault Montecassino he immediately decided that the building would have to be neutralised. Three American attacks on it had failed, and Tuker thought it futile “to hit one’s head against the hardest part of the whole position and risk the failure of the whole operation”. A book found for him by one of his staff in Naples revealed that the masonry walls of the Monastery tapered from twelve to five feet at the top. He decided that the best plan would be to use fighter-bombers armed with 1,000-pound bombs to breach them, the infantry racing in before the defenders could recover from the shock. Tuker had a deservedly high reputation as a tactician, and Freyberg readily took his advice. On February 9, the day Freyberg presented his plan to the Fifth Army, he asked Clark to have the Monastery attacked by fighter-bombers, Clark argued against the idea but observed that if bombers were used he would ask for the heavies and destroy the building. On the 11th, after Gruenther had told him that the torch had been “thrown” to him, Freyberg ordered his G2 (Air), Robin Bell, to submit a formal request for a fighter-bomber mission on the 13th.
There are two important points to be made here. One was that the Eighth Army as early as 1942 had put into action a joint army-air force staff and signal system for controlling direct air support and by early 1944 it was both fast and flexible. Freyberg did not grasp that the US Fifth Army was using the old, cumbrous system of requesting air strikes through normal staff channels. He seemed to think that as fresh information arrived from the heights behind Montecassino or the situation changed radically the USAAF could respond as rapidly and as sensitively as the RAF. (The USAAF was shortly to overhaul its system for providing ground support for the US Army, but in February 1944 that lay ahead.) Another consideration not discovered by the New Zealand staff until the last moment was that the US Army insisted on the demarcation of a “bomb safety line” at least 1,000 yards from the nearest friendly troops.* The second point is a technical one, highly relevant to the decision to prefer heavy bombers to fighter-bombers, taken on the 13th. In simple terms, a fighter-bomber does not “drop” its bomb. It flies at high speed and low altitude in a shallow dive, and at short range “throws” it in a trajectory like an artillery shell. It is, compared with a bomber, very accurate. Medium and heavy bombers, flying at several thousand feet on a level course, in those days used optical sights and compensated for the spread of effect dictated by the laws of ballistics by flying in close formation and releasing a pattern of bombs simultaneously on the order of the “master-bomber”.
From the 9th onwards Brigadier Dimoline was grappling with the difficulties of moving and maintaining his division along an inadequate route ending in six miles of a mountain path fit only for goats. He was so short of pack-mule transport that he was forced to use his 11th Brigade complete as porters, leaving only the 7th and 5th, scheduled to arrive in that order, for the operation. The 7th Brigade was already on the heights when the enemy upset his plans. Early on the morning of the 12th, a day on which a great deal of importance was to happen, Generalleutnant Baade’s 90th Panzer Grenadier Division counterattacked. Two of the 7th Brigade’s battalions, the 1st Royal Sussex and the 4th/16th Punjab were approaching M. Castellone on the way to Snakeshead when the panzer grenadiers assaulted the exhausted and shaky battalions belonging to the US 36th Division holding that feature. Both were drawn into the fight, which they helped to stabilise with the assistance of some good shooting from the New Zealand artillery. So great was the confusion that at one moment they were ordered to attack Terelle, secure in French hands. Both battalions were stuck for the rest of the day in the open under artillery fire and suffered casualties. The fact was that it was extremely difficult to exercise command and control over a battlefield invisible from the plain below, where all the HQs were sited, with radio failure and telephone cables cut by fire, so visits had to be on foot and could take all day. On the 12th Dimoline was up in the combat area all day, and out of touch, until he returned at 6 p.m. to report the situation to Freyberg.
The 12th was also an eventful day for Freyberg. In the morning he was told by the Fifth Army that his request for a fighter-bomber strike on the Monastery had been turned down. He then attended a briefing at HQ 2nd Corps, where he discovered that Keyes and his commanders and staff were alarmingly ignorant about the true situation of his troops or their location. On being closely questioned “It was plain that none of them had been forward or was at all in touch with his men.”3 The exception was the assistant commander of the 34th Division, Brigadier-General Frederic Butler, who contradicted his corps commander’s statement that the Castle, on a feature overlooking the town, was in American hands. He provided the useful information that there was no evidence that there were German troops in the Monastery, but that fire was certainly coming from the slopes below it, and added that in his opinion the key points in the operation were Point 593 on one side of the Monastery and the Castle on the other. (This was an important point, which only became apparent to Butler, and Dimoline along with his brigadiers and battalion commanders who had actually visited the battlefield. The Monastery hypnotised all those who looked up at it from below. In reality the position could be compared to the siege of a medieval castle. The Monastery and Montecassino formed the keep, the last-ditch defence. The complex of ridges, subsumed under the title of Point 593 by Butler, and the Castle were the curtain wall, well furnished with bastions from which a deadly interlocking fire could be brought on the attacker.) Butler also broke the unwelcome news that the men were “out on their feet”, that what had been reported as attacks by full regiments were in reality by weak companies, and that “there had been little movement forward for days”.
In the afternoon Alexander and Harding called on Freyberg at his HQ to brief him on the operation instruction sent formally to the Fifth Army the day before. Its gist was that while he was anxious that the New Zealand Corps’ operation should be pressed on as fast as possible, it was to be less ambitious and the mission to fit the means. (And military realities, it could be said.) Dimoline was to attack with both his brigades, ensuring that he was firm on the ground before he launched them. It would be enough to secure Montecassino and to advance down the hill to cut the road in the town. The thrust from M. Castellone could be scrapped. The 2nd New Zealand, as soon as it could move, should concentrate on establishing the bridgehead across the Rapido in Cassino town. All its strength should be employed in this task, and exploitation forgotten for the time being. Only when the bridgehead could provide a secure base line for further operations would they be attempted was the underlying implication of these fresh instructions.4 (Curiously, there is no evidence of HQ Fifth Army formally communicating Alexander’s instructions in writing or otherwise to Freyberg. HQ AAI’s Operation Instruction No. 42 is certainly in its files, but whether this was due to laxity, the deliberate intention to ignore it or knowledge that Alexander informed Freyberg of its contents is unknown.)5
Freyberg raised the question of the refusal of the air-strike. Alexander gave him his full support and ordered Harding to take the matter up with Gruenther. This bore fruit at 9.30 that night, when Gruenther told Freyberg that a mission of fighter-bombers would attack the Monastery the next day, the 13 th. By the evening of the 12th, however, there had been a significant departure from Tuker’s plan of a coordinated air bombardment and infantry assault. When Dimoline had reported to Freyberg after his trip up the mountain they had discussed the air support question and talked about “softening up” the target in advance, as opposed to a closely coordinated breaching of the walls and an infantry assault. This process would continue while Dimoline completed the difficult business of putting his brigades in position and preparing the attack. Freyberg explained this to Gruenther when they spoke on the telephone late that evening. Gruenther made Clark’s wish that he did not want the Monastery to be destroyed quite clear. He would permit the strike only if, in Freyberg’s opinion, it was a military necessity. Freyberg, assuring him that it was, and that Dimoline, the commander who had seen the ground wanted it, added that in his own view a fighter-bomber strike on the scale envisaged would not demolish the building: “The thing was it would soften the people who are there …” (authors’ emphasis), Major John White, Freyberg’s military assistant, noted in his log.
Meanwhile the true situation on the heights was gradually becoming clearer, at least to Freyberg. At 5.15 p.m. on the 12th Keyes, having had a change of heart, rang up and told Freyberg that the physical condition of his men on the heights was so bad that he could leave them there no longer, and asked him to order the 4th Indian to relieve them first before mounting its attack. This suited Freyberg and Dimoline, and it was agreed, but it was to cause a series of postponements, difficult for anyone who had not ventured on to the actual positions to understand. The 5th Infantry Brigade, struggling up the slopes, was not to complete its takeover from the Americans until the early morning of the 15th. There was worse news to come. It was not until late on the 13th that Dimoline informed Freyberg of a much more serious snag: the Americans had lost the jump-off line from which he was forced by the configuration of the ground to launch his attack.
After dark on the 12th Lieutenant-Colonel J. B. Glennie (who was to write a professional account of the whole operation for a British Army study in 1968) took his battalion, the 1st Royal Sussex, up to Snakeshead. In his own words: “I was led up to the American sector by an American guide who led me up to the German positions until we were fired on. After a hasty retreat the American positions were approached from the enemy side! On arrival it was found that the sector was held by four US battalions (now each only 100 strong) from three different regiments of two divisions.” When it was daylight the reason why the guide had taken him to the wrong location became clear. Like everyone on the staff at the 34th Division and 2nd Corps he believed that Point 593 and the ridge connecting Points 450–455 were held by the 141st and 168th US Infantry, whereas they had been driven off them by Baade’s counter-attack, and were now crouching in gullies below the crest 200 yards short of it, and 800 yards from the Monastery on Point 516 at the nearest. The 142nd Infantry did not hold Massa Albaneta, Point 468, and never had.6 The commander of the brigade saw at first hand that the lie of the land narrowed the front of any attack designed to restore these positions, now an essential preliminary to an advance on Montecassino. The Germans in their re-occupied positions were so skilfully sited in pairs of localities mutually supporting each other that only a broad-front attack had any hope of overcoming them.
Three misunder
standings arose from this. The first was between Freyberg and Dimoline. Dimoline had stated that he could not be ready to attack before nightfall of the 15/16th – the infantry brigadiers being adamant that they would have to attack under cover of darkness – and Freyberg agreed. When later it became apparent to Dimoline that a preliminary attack had to be made against Point 593 and that the main attack could not be mounted until the 16th/17th, Freyberg objected and insisted that he attack Point 593 and the Monastery on the 15th. A terrible misunderstanding was the result because Dimoline did not grasp that Freyberg had refused to permit his preliminary attack. The second misunderstanding occurred because Freyberg did not mention the loss of the vital Point 593 area to Gruenther, nor did he, on the 12th, point out that Dimoline could not attack the next day, as originally intended. No doubt he assumed, reasonably, that the 2nd Corps had told Fifth Army about the true state of affairs by the time that Gruenther phoned him about the air mission. The third misunderstanding was that General Ryder, 34th Division, himself did not know where his forward localities were. When on the morning of the 13th he was informed by the 2nd Corps that a mission was laid on to attack the Monastery that day, he invoked the 1,000-yard bomb safety line rule, protesting that if he withdrew for 600 yards the enemy would surely move up and re-occupy his hard-won gains. He demanded a veto on any air-strike because his troops held the sector and it was under his command. The mission was cancelled at 10 a.m. on the 13th and Fifth Army recorded that Freyberg was now interested in having the Monastery shelled instead. (A historical misconception was to arise from this.7 It was thought that because the British insisted on the bombing of the Monastery, it was they who withdrew from Point 593, so permitting the Germans to move forward and block their attack. In fact the British never moved back, for reasons that will be explained shortly. When referring to the bomb safety line the 34th Division signal reveals that at its HQ it was still believed that its troops held the positions from which they had been driven two days previously.)
Tug of War Page 23