The plan went well enough at first for A and B Companies of the 25th Battalion, which were making for the Hotel Continental and D Company, on its way to the Castle. Private E. H. Groves wrote his account of the D Company affair after the battle:
Before the attack the platoon officer told us that the attack was going to be merely a walk through the battered town. Objective the Castle feature. We had a good look at air photos. During the bombing in the morning most men were washing, shaving and brewing up. There was a lot of diarrhoea but the men’s spirits were good. Pass-word was “Chota-Peg”.
Moved up at about twelve o’clock in single file about five yards apart. Company commander stood as we passed by him. “How’re you feeling boys?” Everyone was full of joy and good cheer. There was laughter and cracks like: “send me where the bullets are thickest”. Our equipment was down to web and ammunition. Our company was below strength. My platoon had 24 men instead of 36 and my section 5 including the leader.
Up on the ridge we approached the town following B Company. Once there we slipped upwards leaving them to go on to clear the town. There was practically no fire. We got into a house on the hillside and found enemy in the lower storey looking down on the town away from us. The section leader and I killed four with a grenade and Thompson Machine Gun (TMC). We could not see if there were more. Found another house from which enemy was pinning down B Company men. We got round the house and killed three with TMC. We think we left enemy there too. But it takes time to clear houses and we had to press on. Ahead on the hillside were two dugouts or tunnels. My section leader stepped out from behind a wall to fire into these holes and was shot through the head by a sniper from below us. Our section now down to three men and I was section leader. We tried to move round the other side of the wall and a Spandau opened up so we were held on both sides. We waited for two hours. Then our own company appeared on our right going up the stone wall on to the ridge. We had got ahead by following B Company. We sang out to them and leapfrogged across. Joined them below the Castle. They were 17 Platoon and the remainder of my 18 Platoon. We moved up to the Keep and established ourselves round the broken walls. The enemy had moved behind the Keep in the quadrangle. Two of us moved through the archway but a Spandau round the corner got the corporal section commander. I moved back and found a hole through which to throw grenades down into the Keep. “Kaput! No shoot!” [was the welcome answer].
We were relieved in the rain by the Essex (5 Indian Brigade), about midnight. Our CSM had brought up the Essex. One company commander amused us by carrying a malacca cane. All day the only rations were emergency chocolate which is awful stuff …
By the morning of the 18th, when I had my first cup of hot tea, my platoon was down to four out of the twenty-four who started.7
A and B Companies of the 25th Battalion followed the barrage in along Caruso road with B Squadron of the 19th Armoured Regiment behind them. They passed their old positions and then the road running past the jail. A few hundred yards beyond they met resistance. There was brisk fire from Castle Hill on the right flank. Machine guns and snipers fired unexpectedly from the ruins of the buildings which they had entered and forced them into small infiltrating groups. The usually unreliable radio net between companies and battalion headquarters failed at 1 p.m. Snipers killed the runners who carried messages and the linesmen who were laying cables behind the advance. The tanks were unable to follow the infantry who by now were clambering over piles of concrete and girders and crossing sixty-foot craters. Smoke and dust still enveloped the ruins. It was hard to maintain direction. Even the loom of the hill on the right was not an effective aid because most of the fire came from the caves and ruined buildings clinging to its side and at its foot, and the infantry tended to swing off to the left to avoid it. The leading companies became intermixed. Control was soon lost and it was difficult to maintain forward momentum. Small pockets of Germans, continually on the move from position to position in the smoke, made the clearance of the town into an unpleasant game of cops and robbers. In the afternoon, German artillery joined in the battle from the Belmonte–Atina area, where it was protected by steep hills, and Nebelwerfers came out of hiding from beyond the Villa S. Lucia to make conditions even more unpleasant. By 3.30 p.m. A Company had advanced past the Nunnery on the left and a platoon had reached the convent on Highway No. 6. There they shared the remains of the large, sturdy building with Germans who prevented any further advance. Unsupported, the platoon withdrew. Another platoon turned right down the northern fork of Highway No. 6 with the intention of getting behind the Germans who were opposing B Company. But they were halted after a hundred yards. B Company met suffer resistance in the buildings under the hill and could not reach its first objective which was Highway No. 6. The last line of the barrage along Highway No. 6 was fired twice more to help the companies forward in the evening and concentrations fell on troublesome mortars in the area beyond. But the real need was for more troops properly organised and these were not forthcoming. C Company, the 25th Battalion’s reserve, went forward to the area of the jail and the Nunnery, not to press the attack but to maintain communications. It was midnight before B Company of the 24th Battalion arrived in A Company’s area as the only paltry reinforcement.
What had gone wrong? The Germans thought that they had been let off the hook. A member of the 2nd/3rd Parachute Regiment later taken prisoner revealed that:
One part of a company of 2/3 Parachute Regiment was above the Continental and the other in a building near the Botanical Gardens (beside the Gari) when the bombing ended. No. 5 Company was round the church to the south of Route 6, No. 7 was round the School below the Casde and No. 8 was in the Castle. 7 Company was completely overrun. We formed a line of survivors with 60 men between the Telegraph Pylon on the hill below the Castle down to Route 6; eventually from the Castle to the Continental. We had had twelve Mark IV Specials in houses round the Continental and all but one were destroyed by the bombing. We sent out many men on patrol that night to give the impression of strength and to dig out buried men. We put the NZ troops on the defensive. On March 16th we had about 160 men in the town. On the night of the 16th/17th we got 80 fresh men. The New Zealand Infantry failed because they did not carry on past the Continental where there were no troops to hold them up. Our going back into the town was a bluff. There were only 40 men in the Continental in the afternoon of the 15th.
But that was more than enough to contain the survivors of two companies of the 25th Battalion. There had been a disgraceful delay over bringing the 24th and 26th Battalions into the fight. A private soldier of the 26th recalled that he had been told that the tanks would lead the way for his second wave, but when the tanks were halted by debris on the outskirts of the town, instead of pushing on alone they hung about waiting for something to happen. The steady movement forward intended by Kippenberger never took place and neither battalion commander nor the deputy brigade commander, I. L. Bonifant, was on the spot to sort things out. At a conference before he was wounded Kippenberger said that the infantry would have to double down the road to their start line when the bombing stopped. It was a mistake to suggest that tanks were going to be able to keep up initially and everyone should have been impressed with the need for speed. Instead the impression was that they were going to have a walk-over. So late in the war that was a surprising error, explained by Kippenberger’s comment that by then too many units and sub-units in his division were commanded by understudies and that the 5th Infantry Brigade had a poor lot of battalion commanders.
The course of operation DICKENS was to prove a series of mishaps and heroic actions, by battalions, companies and platoons parried by equally small parties of the enemy, disconnected, failing, repeated, and eventually abandoned. As in AVENGER the basic cause was lack of troops. The German commanders were surprised, even perplexed that so huge an expenditure of fire-power was followed up by no more than handfuls of infantry and a few tanks.
As was predictable, the town itself was converte
d into an anti-tank obstacle of enormous craters, tangles of girders and roof-beams and masonry, from which a few parachutists with more than enough machine guns emerged. The best method of progress in such circumstances was to operate groups of infantry no bigger than platoons, each with a couple of tanks to cover them and each other. The infantry located an enemy post to be dealt with by the close-range precision fire of the tank gunners and their 75-mm cannon, after which they would rush in with grenades. The tanks, however, could not move until a route had been cleared for them, but the engineers, unprotected, were checked by the hot fire of the defenders, so there was an impasse, and the whole attack on the town was frustrated. Only four tanks, their commanders dismounted and choosing routes and the crews clearing with their own picks and shovels, contrived to work their way forward.
The attack on the Castle went better. A platoon of D Company of the 25th Battalion escaladed the couloir leading up to Point 165, and emerged from the scrub to eliminate the defence posts there. It took a company HQ and twenty-four prisoners, only to be pinned by fire from the Castle on Point 193 on one side and Point 236 above them on the other. The other two platoons of D Company took the Castle and another twenty-two prisoners, but this coup was not promptly followed up by the 5th Indian Brigade as called for in the plan. The 1st/4th Essex partly because of signals failures and partly through lack of enterprise did not reach the Castle until midnight on the 15 th, by which time D Company commander had been forced to call in his exposed platoon from Point 165, where it was under attack. The 1st/9th Gurkha Rifles were supposed to be in possession of Hangman’s Hill by dusk, but the 1st/6th Rajputana Rifles who were supposed to have secured the intervening features, had been shattered by an intense concentration of Nebelwerfer fire, losing two companies. Its attacks failed twice, that night and later the next day, when an unlucky hit wrote off battalion HQ including the commanding officer and the adjutant. The commanding officer of the 1st/9th, learning of the first disaster to the Rajputana Rifles, decided to hold two of his companies back at the Castle to wait for daylight, but relying on the skill of his mountaineers to move silently on a hillside in the dark, he sent the two others forward to sneak on to Hangman’s Hill and hold it. One stumbled into an ambush, the other disappeared into the night.
Next day a New Zealand artillery observing officer reported men moving about on Hangman’s Hill, and shortly afterwards a faint voice was heard on the C Company’s radio reporting that they had taken the position and were in possession. Hangman’s Hill was only 300 yards from the Monastery walls, but as the enemy still held Points 202 and 236 the Gurkhas’ hope of rapid reinforcement was slight. However, the battered “Raj. Rifs”, still good for a fight, took on Point 202, while the rest of the Gurkha battalion threaded its way in single file up to Hangman’s Hill. The reader can obtain some idea of the pace of mountain warfare by looking at the apparently short distance from Castle Hill to Hangman’s Hill on the panorama, and noting that it took eight hours to cover. By then parachutists and Gurkhas were already intermingled on the crag in close fighting; the company commander, his leg broken, was sitting with his back to a rock shouting encouragement to his men. He was awarded the DSO. When the rest of the battalion arrived the Germans prudently withdrew.
On the German side the conduct of the battle was dictated by the extraordinary Generalmajor Heidrich, 1st Parachute Division, who regarded the battlefield as his personal fief, would share its defence with no other troops and brook no advice or orders from above on how to run his battle. Von Senger was kept entirely in the dark about the situation. Heidrich’s reports were deliberately vague, phrased to conceal rather than inform. Crises were only reported after they had been surmounted, or painted in such lurid colours that the eventual success of the parachutists appeared all the more heroic. Such exaggeration was unnecessary. Their ardour and self-sacrifice, pressed almost to the point of suicide, has become a legend. Heidrich was tolerated because he was successful. (When in May he was finally ordered to withdraw he refused to accept the order from anyone but Kesselring himself; this gasconade prompting Kesselring to observe drily that this was one of the disadvantages of having such strong-minded subordinates.) Von Vietinghoff and von Senger did not expect him to hold out if there were another big air attack, or that his supply dumps could last for many days of fighting. Heidrich was promised support from the Luftwaffe, but the general feeling was that rain would be better. More immediately, and more practically, Kesselring sent the 14th Corps two battalions of the 115th Panzer Grenadiers. They were used on the 16th to relieve the 4th Parachute Regiment on Colle S. Angelo to free it to reinforce the garrison of Cassino. At 6.30 p.m. the longed-for rain began to fall.
By the 17th such opportunity for success as had ever existed was lost and Operation DICKENS had stagnated. It had separated into three sub-battles. In the town and its environs the New Zealanders continued their nibbling, step-by-step attacks and the parachutists their fanatical defence. Both Clark and Major-General A. Galloway (who temporarily commanded the 4th Indian Division during March 9th–25th) favoured throwing in every available infantryman, but Freyberg, wisely perhaps, preferred the tactics of infiltration of small parties supported by a tank or two. It certainly kept down his losses. At the end of the battle the town was shared, and the two sides – separated in places by no more than the thickness of a wall – kept up a small, bitter private war until the May offensive.
The second bone of contention was the Castle, now firmly in the hands of the Essex and parts of the Rajputana Rifles, which commanded the covered way between the town and the summits of Monte-cassino. On 18th/19th, at the moment when the Essex were preparing to move up to reinforce the Gurkhas on Hangman’s Hill, it was ferociously attacked by a group of parachutists who blew down a section of wall to gain entry. A terrific struggle ensued, resembling an eighteenth-century assault on a fort, rifles firing through loopholes, the attackers repelled by showers of grenades. The parachutists assaulted three times and were beaten off three times. The defenders were down to sixty men commanded by the one remaining officer, with three wounds, when the parachutists, under attack by Indian riflemen who had left the security of the wall and sustained an intense artillery defensive fire, finally gave up.
The third battlefield was the area of the Monastery itself. A converging attack was planned for the early morning of the 19th, from Hangman’s Hill on one side and by a force of tanks from the direction of Snakeshead on the other. In fact the spearhead of one attack, the Gurkhas, was itself under siege, and the reinforcements who succeeded in fighting their way up to them amounted only to forty fit men and thirty wounded. Their attack from Hangman’s Hill was called off. The tank attack, composed of American, New Zealand sub-units and some light tanks from the reconnaissance regiment of the 4th Indian Division, was a bold stroke which “for a few hours had the German radios crackling with excitement which almost amounted to panic”. It was as mismanaged as any operation could be. Its commander, borrowed from the British artillery at short notice, had no experience of armoured warfare and had been given no clear mission, it had no accompanying infantry, did not contact the battalion from the 4th Indian Division on Snakeshead, and the commander, who made a long and fatal pause to obtain clarification of his instructions, finally withdrew up the mountain track by which he had arrived, to find that the enterprising parachutists had hastily sown it with mines. Fourteen tanks were lost in this fiasco.
These, it will be understood, are but three incidents in a chaotic operation in which some unit or other was desperately engaged almost every hour at some point over the whole area of operations. It was clear enough by the evening of the 19th that it was profitless to persist in DICKENS, but it was only recognised on the 23rd, when Alexander ordered the New Zealand Corps to stand fast and consolidate their gains, and Hangman’s Hill to be abandoned. Elaborate arrangements were made to prevent alerting the Germans. Three volunteer officers were sent by separate routes with verbal orders for the withdrawal, each with a
carrier pigeon to take back a message reporting the success of their mission. Two of the officers managed to slip past the enemy posts, and the evacuation was carried out without a single casualty on the night of the 24th.
The imaginative officer who composed Heidrich’s battle reports wrote that the garrison on Hangman’s Hill was still resisting desperately on the 26th and then that it had fallen on the 27th, 165 dead being counted and 11 prisoners taken. This was the only diverting item of news in a defeat redeemed by the courage and endurance of the troops, but none the less a defeat. Heidrich’s victory was not cheap. Half of his 2nd/3rd Parachute Infantry disappeared during the bombing of the town, and of the four battalions defending it each could assemble only about two platoons on the 23rd. Von Senger, only too aware of how far the troops available to defend Cassino had been ground down by attrition, fully expected the Allies to resume their onslaught after a pause, for their artillery and tanks kept up a fire of such intensity after the 23 rd that his rate of loss remained the same as during the offensive. His fears were unfounded, although he would not have been much easier in mind had he known that at last the Allied high command had resolved to wage war in more enlightened style than the one which had ensured the string of failures which had marked the past three months.
*
Why am I so downcast
Oh, why so full of woe?
An eye above is fixed on me
Watching where e’er I go.
V
Interlude
Tug of War Page 26