Battlefields (2001) s01e02 Episode Script
Cassino
We're the D-Day Dodgers out in Italy Always drinking vino, always on the spree 8th Army skivers and the Yanks We live in Rome We laugh at tanks For we're the D-Day Dodger In sunny Italy In the summer of 1944, British troops in Italy were accused of shirking the war effort, MP Nancy Astor claimed that they were having a paid holiday while the real fighting was going on in Normandy, The men in Italy should have been bitter, but most were too tired to care.
They'd just spent four months throwing themselves against an extraordinary German defensive position for a questionable victory.
They'd toiled up mountainsides, baked by the sun and buffeted by wind and snow.
They'd forded freezing rivers and marched through miles of mud.
Italy was anything but a holiday.
It was always a controversial campaign, After victory in North Africa, the Allies were split over where to attack Fortress Europe, Churchill finally persuaded the Americans to keep up the pressure on the Germans in Italy, The Allies swept through Sicily and on to the mainland, The demoralised Italians surrendered soon after the first troops landed, It looked like being a short campaign, But Italy is a cruel country for invaders, Sheer mountains form its spiny backbone, Rivers block the line of advance, For the young men sent to fight here, it was a punishing place that would push them to the limits of their endurance, It it was unbelievable.
Always raining or snowing or sleeting.
One was permanently sopping wet.
German opened fire everything they had, they put on us.
Artillery, machine-guns, every It was it was like being in the middle of lightning.
And then the machine-gun bullets sweeping over one's head and sometimes, of course, not always over the head.
We lost a lot of men.
The Germans made the Allies struggle for every mile, The advance stopped at Cassino, On 15th January 1944, weary soldiers of the 5th Army dislodged the Germans from the top of this mountain, Monte Trocchio, They'd fought all the way up from the south, and the last seven miles alone had cost them 16,000 casualties.
As the men hauled themselves up to the crest, they must have been appalled by what they saw across the valley.
The Germans were snug in an apparently impregnable defensive position, They had complete mastery of the road to Rome, which ran up the centre of this valley, To advance north, the Allies would either have to make a dash through the gap or storm the mountain's strongholds, The worst of the Italian campaign was still to come.
Surveying the whole scene was a great monastery which would become the haunting symbol of the war in Italy, Monte Cassino, It was such a vast building and it dominated everything, and it did have that slightly eerie feeling of, er Iooking at you the whole time.
It seemed as though it was looking down on you, it was such an overpowering position up there.
The clouds broke suddenly and you could see the monastery five miles away, perched up on the top of this incredible cliff, dominating everything.
It was here that Hitler's commander in Italy made a stand for the winter, Field Marshal Kesselring, nicknamed Smiling Albert, created a formidable blockade that stretched across Italy from coast to coast, He called it the Gustav Line, The Germans blasted bridges and roads to slow down the Allied advance, They felled hundreds of trees to improve their observation and they mined the whole area, Particularly repellent was this vicious little shoe mine.
It's made of wood, with just the minimum of metal parts to make it hard to find with a mine-detector.
It contains just enough explosive to blow off a man's foot.
The cruel logic of this was that a crippled soldier imposed far more of a burden on his own side than a dead one.
There were thousands of these scattered all around Cassino.
They made the best use of every bit of rock, of cranny, of of caves, and they knew the tracks which we had to use, and they covered all those tracks, both with machine-gun fire and shelling as well.
The Germans dug themselves deep into the hillside, Unless they got a direct hit, they were they were safe down in their in these tunnels.
German ingenuity improved on nature on the slopes above Cassino.
This artificial cave is still littered with the fins of British mortar bombs.
But the cave is so cunningly sited, scooped into the very back of a ridge, that there was just no chance of these being fired into it.
The Germans even had the weather on their side, January 1944 brought one of the worst Italian winters that locals could remember, The advance foundered in the mud, At night, it was dark, cold, wet and miserable.
We had no cover of any kind.
Of course, there were no things like tents or anything.
It was either snowing or blowing or raining and, erm it was a very, very cold time.
The interminable misery of life on the front line was a world apart from the more measured pace of Allied headquarters, The Allied commander-in-chief in Italy was a British officer, General Sir Harold Alexander, He had made his headquarters at the King of Naples'palace at Caserta, an hour's drive from the Gustav Line, This elegant atmosphere was a reflection of the man himself, Harold Macmillan, British resident minister out here, commented that the conversation at Caserta was more likely to be about classical architecture or the best way of driving pheasants in low country than about the war.
Charming and popular, Alexander was a good choice to command the troops of a dozen nations who served under him in Italy, Macmillan wrote admiringly that he didn't give orders, but made suggestions.
This relaxed, easy-going style was a great strength and a great weakness.
Alexander couldn't control his American subordinate, General Mark Clark, commander of 5th Army, Clark was aggressive and vain, His personal ambition was a flaw that would affect his military judgement, The distrust between these two men mirrored a wider Anglo-American divide over the whole worth of the Italian campaign, To the Americans, it was a sideshow wasting men and ammunition, To the British, the struggle was occupying German troops who might otherwise be free to fortify Normandy, The Allies were pulling against each other, and this discord was to have terrible consequences, Churchill knew it was imperative to break the deadlock, He revived an ambitious plan for an amphibious landing at the little ports of Anzio and Nettuno, From there, the Allies could threaten the Gustav Line from behind, "It will astonish the world and it will certainly frighten Kesselring, "Churchill declared, For a soldier, an amphibious landing by night is a risky business, Time and tide are crucially important and bad weather can wreck things before the enemy even fires a shot.
Troops are desperately vulnerable when they hit the beach and thereafter they must depend upon the sea for resupply and reinforcement.
26-year-old Edward Grace was in one of the leading craft approaching Anzio, We expected to get a right royal reception from the Germans.
All the machine-guns would open up at once as we approached the beach, and no doubt there would be heavy artillery fire coming right down onto the Navy, the ships and also, no doubt, some of the shells landing right on top of us on the beach.
Fresh in the minds of the men heading for Anzio was the memory of the near disaster at Salerno the previous September.
There, the Germans had lunged back instantly and almost pushed the Allies into the sea.
But this time, the Germans should have their hands full on the Gustav Line.
Just before the Anzio landing, they were to be distracted by an attack miles away on the Gustav Line, General Clark ordered his battle-scarred 36th Division, a Texas outfit, to cross the river Gari, two miles south of Cassino, and break into the valley beyond, The men had to make the crossing in lightweight assault boats of wood and canvas, They constructed them at a safe distance from the river, The night of 20th January was wet and foggy.
The Texans had to carry their boats almost two miles across a flooded minefield, under shell and mortar fire.
Then they had to paddle across the river, gain handholds on the far bank and hang on until the engineers built bridges.
The Gari may not look much of an obstacle, but it's deep and fast-flowing, especially when swollen by winter rains, Alarmingly, the Texan commander, Major-General Fred Walker, privately thought that the mission was hopeless.
He wrote in his diary "We might succeed, but I don't see how we can, "The crossing is dominated by heights on both sides of the valley "where German observers are ready, "Clark sent me his best wishes, "I think he is worried over the fact that he made an unwise decision," Clark was right to be worried, 900 Americans never even made it to the water, Some boats were damaged and sank, Others capsized as the men climbed in, A few were swept helplessly away, I heard paddles slapping water and hitting together and then the men yelling when their boat turned over.
It curdled your blood to hear those men drown.
Amazingly, some of them made it across here in boats, swimming or on footbridges which were soon smashed.
In the morning, the survivors sheltered in irrigation ditches or flooded foxholes.
The Texans tried again that afternoon, but it was the same dreadful story.
Eventually, the Germans, horrified by the scene, stopped firing and stacked the bodies up like driftwood, The Texas Division lost nearly 1700 men.
It was a write-off.
Many Texans never forgave General Clark, One company commander told a reporter "I had 184 men, "48 hours later, I had 17, "If that's not mass murder, I don't know what is," The diversion at Cassino had failed to pin down the Germans on the Gustav Line, Now the men approaching Anzio were at risk, At last we could feel the crunch of the ship touching the sand underneath, and the ramps came down, and then I as the officer of the platoon jumped into the water.
Edward Grace and his men waded to the beach, bracing themselves for the first burst of machine-gun fire, There was nothing but darkness and there was no sound at all.
The men pushed on into the scrub beyond the beach, Still there was nothing, And then at last there was one single German, erm soldier came running down without any weapons and of course we captured him and asked him.
He was very polite, he spoke half English and half German, and he explained to us that all the all his battalion had been moved and he was left behind because he was repairing a couple of broken-down vehicles.
The Germans had been completely outmanoeuvred, The landing was a spectacular success, Alexander telegraphed Churchill, promising that the American beachhead commander, General John Lucas, would push quickly inland, Churchill replied, "I am very glad you are pegging out claims "rather than digging in beachheads," But General Lucas wasn't pegging out claims, He was confused by contradictory instructions.
Alexander wanted him to push inland and threaten German communications with the Gustav Line.
There'd even been talk of capturing Rome.
But at the last moment, Clark warned him, "Don't stick your neck out, Johnny.
"I did it at Salerno and nearly got my head cut off.
" So Lucas decided to be cautious and built up men and vehicles.
We thought, "Why couldn't we have marched on in those first two days straight to Rome?" There seemed to have been no opposition.
We might just as well have sent the Germans a postcard.
On the third day, 30,000 Germans surrounded the beachhead, All the advantage of surprise had been lost and the sacrifices made in the attacks on the Gustav Line were wasted.
Lucas kept unloading for a full week, He didn't attempt to advance until he'd assembled 70,000 men.
Only now they faced 95,000 Germans.
The Allies were trapped and would remain so for months to come, Churchill was furious, "I expected to see a wildcat roaring through the mountains, "and what do I find? A whale wallowing on the beaches," America even threatened to pull out of Italy altogether, The crisis galvanised Alexander and Clark into action, Both their reputations were at stake, Clark knew he had to keep up the pressure at Cassino to stop the Germans moving even more troops to Anzio, He dared not risk another attack in the valley, He had to take control of the high ground and the monastery itself, He ordered another American division, the 34th, to fight its way onto the massif and capture Monastery Hill, It was an order that must have struck dread into the hearts of the men, And from here we can see just how the monastery dominates everything around it.
A single observer up there could bring artillery fire down on any possible Allied approach.
To the men overlooked by it, the monastery took on a sinister fascination, You had the feeling it Iooked at you and you had no idea how many people were inside looking at you as well.
So you did your best to keep it out of you.
What appeared to the Allies as a malevolent fortress was in fact an internationally important religious site, St Benedict had founded a monastery here in the sixth century, choosing a lofty site for protection, Only, he had chosen too well, Its commanding position had made it a target for every passing army for a thousand years, Now it lay at the heart of the Gustav Line with guns pointing at it from all directions, The Germans were acutely sensitive about the monastery, They'd recently been accused of cultural vandalism when they publicly burnt books from a great library at Naples and now they had the perfect opportunity to restore their reputation.
Though there was more to it than that.
The local German commander was a devout Roman Catholic.
The Germans declared a 300-yard neutral area around the monastery which the Allies agreed to respect, The Americans now had the thankless task of trying to capture the hill without damaging the monastery itself, By 4th February, they'd fought their way onto this ridge, known as Snakeshead, It curved round in a boomerang shape towards the monastery, but the route to it was formidable, It was a place that 20-year-old John Buckeridge would never forget, On one side of the ridge was a sheer drop down into the valley and on the other side were these great clefts, these great cuts in the rock, where you just couldn't go.
I mean, you had to be on the top, and the flat bit was quite narrow, really.
By day, the Americans were pinned down by mortar and machine-gun fire, Each night, half-frozen and reeling with fatigue, they were expected to attack blindly uphill towards the Germans, There are limits to what flesh and blood can stand and the number of Americans up here dwindled day by day.
There was no hope of reinforcement.
All other Allied divisions were at full stretch at Anzio or against the Gustav Line.
At a meeting on 8th February, Alexander told Clark to bring his men down, Clark reluctantly agreed, but delayed the order for three nights in the desperate hope of an American breakthrough, The survivors were traumatised and suffering from exposure, John Buckeridge saw them come down.
They were exhausted.
They had fought themselves to a standstill and they had nothing left in them, in fact, to get on any more, and if they had been asked to get on and attack again, I don't think they had the energy to do it.
Alexander couldn't afford to ease up the pressure on the Germans so he brought in fresh troops from his other army in Italy, the 8th, His multinational force included New Zealanders and Indians as well as French, North Africans and Canadians, The experienced 4th Indian Division would replace the Americans on the ridge, It's difficult to imagine the sufferings of men existing up here on the massif.
They couldn't dig into the rock, so they built these stone shelters.
The British called them sangars.
It was freezing cold, often snowing or raining, and although these gave some protection from German weapons, they gave little against the weather.
During the hours of daylight, men were prisoners up here, unable to put their head over the top without being shot.
The sangars that we took over from the Americans were probably not more than 12 inches or 18 inches high, barely high enough for a person to sit up without their heads protruding over, as we were soon to discover, because soon after first light one of my corporals was shot in the head by a sniper from a ridge about 400 yards away across a valley.
And within the morning, my own batman sitting with me in my own sangar was shot and killed.
John Buckeridge's divisional commander was Major-General Francis Tuker, an outspoken man with a genuine concern for his men, Tuker looked closely at what his men were being asked to do.
They had to attack uphill astride this razor-back ridge.
On one side, it drops away sharply over a precipice.
On the other, it's deeply etched with ravines.
It's barbarous country, and Tuker knew his men would be massacred.
Tuker believed attacking the monastery head-on was a desperate mistake, He badgered his senior commanders to cut through the mountains north of Cassino to sever the German supply route, Although the terrain was even more difficult, it suited the mountain skills of his Indian troops and the Moroccan goumiers of the French Army, But Tuker was ignored, His men would still have to attack the monastery, To improve their odds, he decided to do a little private research, He wanted to find out more about the layout of the building which he believed the Germans were occupying, One afternoon, Tuker drove down to Naples and spent a few hours browsing in the bookshops.
Eventually, he found what he was looking for - a book on the construction of the monastery published in 1879.
What he read convinced him there was only one way of dealing with that mighty fortress with its ten-foot-thick walls, That evening, he fired off a memo to his superior demanding that the monastery should be bombed off the face of the earth.
It was a highly controversial request and it brought Alexander and Clark head to head, Clark, whose decision it was, opposed the bombing because he wasn't convinced that there were Germans inside, But Alexander made it clear that Clark's first duty was to support his men, Clark was forced to back down or be humiliatingly overruled, The all-seeing eye would be put out, The bombing was set for 16th February, when a break in the bad weather was predicted, Beforehand, the Allies dropped leaflets over and around the monastery warning the monks to leave, It was the news most dreaded by the monastery's frail 80-year-old abbot, Gregorio Diamare.
Nothing in his 35 peaceful years of prayer and study in his mountain eyrie had prepared him for the horror of being in the middle of a war zone.
The Germans had forced all but five of his monks to leave, but in recent weeks, the monastery had been overrun by hundreds of terrified civilians in search of sanctuary, They were starving and dying by scores from some virulent disease.
And now their sanctuary was about to become a tomb.
Abbot Diamare asked the Germans for help and was told his flock would be guided to safety on the night of the 15th, But it was the morning of the 15th that an ominous sound was heard, We could hear a droning in the sky and we looked up and we saw a great horde of American Flying Fortresses coming our way.
The American Air Force, taking advantage of the good weather, had gone a day early, but they hadn't told anybody.
The consequences were disastrous for the refugees, We saw the bomb doors open and bombs coming down.
The whole ground shuddered under the great weight of these bombs coming down.
Great er clouds of of dust and smoke came up from the monastery building and one now and again saw great bits of them kind of going into the air as a result of an explosion.
And it really was very frightening.
In the ruins of the monastery lay 200 dead, many of them women and children, The abbot, carrying a cross, Led the shell-shocked survivors into German lines, When all the smoke had cleared and all the dust had cleared, this very regular sort of building had been reduced to ruins with jagged walls, with gaping holes.
But the foundations at the very bottom still appeared to be absolutely intact.
The bombing hadn't been heavy enough to completely obliterate the monastery.
Instead, it had turned it in a labyrinth of ruins, ideal for the German defenders, The Germans occupied it immediately, making the monastery an armed fortress, There could be no more heavy bombing, as it would endanger the Royal Sussex Regiment, who had to follow up with a ground attack, But because the air raid had gone early, they weren't ready, That night, John Buckeridge and a company of just 66 men launched themselves at this rocky crest, Point 593, The height, now crowned with a memorial, barred the way to the monastery.
Once on Point 593, you were being shot at from probably three different directions and you didn't actually know where they were coming from.
Just beyond it, there is a sheer drop, and some soldiers just fell over the top.
Two officers, 32 men, were written off, either wounded or killed or captured that first night.
The next night, they attacked again, this time with 300 men, They tried all night by various means.
Sometimes we got onto Point 593 only for the Germans to open up with all their machine-guns firing and then counter-attacking, and by about two or three in the morning, it was quite clear we just couldn't stay there.
We hadn't done it, we couldn't do it, we just couldn't get on.
After the second night, the Royal Sussex was cut to half its strength, All General Tuker's fears about the folly of attacking along the ridge had been justified, But the commanders wouldn't give up, It was the turn of the Goorkhas, Gordon Shakespear, a 23-year-old officer, had no time to study the terrain, It was a complete ring of fire that came at us as we moved down to the start line.
Apart from that, grenades and mines.
Anti-personnel mines, S-mines, trip-wires the whole area was festooned with them.
As the Germans fired, one Goorkha company made for the only cover, a patch of scrub.
It was booby-trapped and the first men tripped a string of grenades.
Half the leading platoon was blown up.
Others met withering machine-gun fire.
There was no surprise.
The Germans knew we were coming.
Some just got through, but the majority of them were stopped and, er casualties were so heavy that it wasn't worth going on.
Alexander called off the ridge attack, saying that he didn't want another Passchendaele, But Cassino had become a haunting reminder of the Western Front of 1917 - relentless attacks, blasted landscape and human misery, Monte Cassino now dominated the minds not only of the men who lived beneath its shadow but also of their commanders, It seemed to blind them to the reality of what they were asking men to do, The next attack would go straight up the mountain.
First, the attackers would have to take Castle Hill, just behind me.
Then they'd work their way across the front of the mountain to Hangman's Hill, that rocky outcrop on the left, Only when they'd got that could they attack the monastery itself.
Sergeant Bill Hawkins, who'd spent three years in North Africa, now had to make the climb of his life, Making our way up the up the Castle Hill You can understand, with the hill strewn with boulders and thickets, and in the dark, it was raining, the shellfire was terrific and the sniper fire was continuous it was a difficult climb, but we were all sort of pleased that once we'd got up there, we was inside the castle.
The castle itself was a vital link in the chain leading up the massif.
It was viciously counter-attacked by German paras.
The paratroops, one of Hitler's elite forces, had just been sent to strengthen the Cassino defences, They had instructions to hold the line whatever the cost, They had the grenades with long wooden handles and they could throw them quite some distance, but they were throwing 'em up to drop in the castle.
To shoot at those, you've got to put your head up and look over the top of the wall.
That was when you put yourself in the position that somebody could shoot you anyway.
It was a difficult place to defend, really.
The battle took on the fury of a medieval siege, The Essex fired so many mortar bombs that the red-hot barrels began to melt, Then the paras got right up to the castle wall and laid explosives, They blew down part of the wall, Burying more than 20 men of the Essex Regiment.
Then they burst into the courtyard and fought hand to hand.
The battle for Castle Hill reached a new level of ferocity, There was casualties lying all over the ground outside.
There was New Zealand, er German, Goorkha, British.
But it was also the scene of a curious old-fashioned gallantry, In the middle of the battle, the Germans asked for an armistice to collect casualties, Stretcher-bearers from both sides, German and our own, went out and collected in the wounded from outside the castle walls.
We had approximately 14 or 15 German prisoners in the castle.
Some of these volunteered to go out with our stretcher-bearers and bring in the wounded.
The Essex Regiment had held the castle, but they could get no further, We thought we were up high, but the monastery was much, much higher.
I think anybody who managed to get up to the monastery had got to be almost superhuman.
The monastery remained out of reach, All conventional attacks had failed, But there would be one last startling attempt to outsmart the Germans using a forgotten path round the back, Indian engineers had spent weeks turning a goat-track into a road, They'd laid it stone by stone, concealing their activities behind camouflage screens.
At dawn on 19th March, German sentries in a valley behind the monastery were puzzled to hear the sound of a tank, Suddenly it appeared out of the gloom, followed by nearly 40 more, heading straight for the heart of the German position, Robert Frettlhr, a 20-year-old German, rushed to repel the attack, A tank, it's a very scary thing, I can assure you, very, very scary, when you hear 'em.
And they seem to be louder at night-times than what they are during the day.
The Germans were caught completely off guard.
Lesser defenders might have been shaken, but not the paras.
You have to have special equipment which were anti-tank mines, which were like a dinner plate upside down.
If the tank rolls over it, tips the plate, and then there's 70 Ib of dynamite under there, blows the tracks off.
The leading tank hit a mine and blew up, It blocked the road, it were a narrow track and that's how they all got stuck behind one another.
They were trying to get round it, and eventually to get out.
Then they were just picked off as they were trying to escape downhill again.
And that were the whole episode with the New Zealand tanks trying to get up to the monastery.
The Allies had little to show for the thousands of lost lives, The survivors were weary and sick at heart, desperate for deliverance from their living hell, Alexander's cool was shaken by a terse message from Churchill, demanding to know why he kept throwing men against the monastery, Alexander was only too aware that another failure would not be tolerated, Things started to go his way with the arrival of spring, The flooded valleys began to dry out and the river torrents subsided, At last, Alexander had time and weather on his side, and this time he had a proper plan, drawn up here at Caserta by his chief of staff John Harding, Alexander was persuaded that the secret of success lay in launching a mass offensive instead of mounting piecemeal attacks.
Operation Diadem used for the first time the full strength of Alexander's two armies in Italy, the 5th and the 8th, concentrated on a front of just 20 miles, Alexander cloaked everything in secrecy and ordered the preparation of a real smokescreen at Cassino.
Smoke generators like this were manhandled down to the river to mask the construction of 18 bridges.
You light the fuse and it belches out foul smoke for about 15 minutes.
Hundreds of these would create a dense smokescreen that veiled the sun and blinded German observers.
The whole valley were covered in smoke so that the Allies could bring their troops and refreshment and whatever to the front line.
And it were terrible stuff, it used to make you sick when you had to breathe it in.
Hundreds of tanks were smuggled up to the front line, In their place were left dummy tanks made of wood and canvas so that the Germans would not detect any movement, The Allies even managed to smuggle in the 50,000-strong Polish Corps that the Germans thought was miles away, Only one commander was unhappy with Alexander's plan - Mark Clark, He felt angry because Alexander had shifted his 5th Army to the coastal sector, leaving Cassino under British control, He would never be master of Monte Cassino, a snub he wouldn't forget, But the monastery which had cost so many lives was still a target, There was one nation willing to accept the terrible challenge; the Poles, They'd lost their homeland in 1939, carved up between the Germans and the Russians, Now they wanted to remind the world of their existence, Ryszard Kirakowski of the Carpathian Regiment was 22 at Cassino, We were preparing ourselves long time for that encounter with Germans.
We suffer enough during their occupation and there was a time to pay back this other thing.
That was time we were fighting for our freedom.
The Poles, like the Americans and British before them, would attack along Snakeshead Ridge, We knew something were going to happen because, er they used to cover the whole valley in fog every night after night.
But that particular night, on the 11th of May, there were nothing.
It were just clear, er and it was awfully quiet.
As soon eleven o'clock came, suddenly sky became white.
1,600 guns opened fire.
It was I cannot Something spectacular, you know? All of a sudden, he whole sky lit up.
It were just like somebody throwing switches, they're firing, lighting up.
This were the artillery.
It sounded absolutely terrible.
It were just like an earthquake, I should say.
The whole ground shakes with these grenades.
Because the whole mountain were rock.
You look at that and you think, "Well, after that bombardment, "there couldn't be anybody left on German side.
" But of course it wasn't true.
And you just, er laid in your little foxhole and hoped for the best.
After the bombardment, the attacks began, For the first time in the campaign, the Allies outnumbered the Germans three to one, The battle would last for seven days, It's difficult to describe.
Nobody wants to remember shouts and shooting and killing.
That's something dreadful which you do, and you do because you have to do.
If you don't, they will do that to you.
But it's not pleasant when you're killing somebody.
I remember, I always live with that, when German threw hand-grenade on me and I shot him before he fell over his grenade, and grenade exploded over him and I was all covered in his blood.
You see, still I have I am dreaming about it, but it was necessary.
On the sixth day, the German commanders gave the order to retreat, The Gustav Line had been broken some miles away from Cassino, German paratrooper Robert Frettl hr's escape route was back over Monastery Hill, There were a big flash and that's when I got wounded.
And when I woke up, my left leg were ban were damaged.
It were like a balloon and so on, and I crawled into the first-aid post in the monastery.
He was taken prisoner the following morning as the Poles walked unopposed into the monastery, They raised a home-made flag, The Poles were victors of the monastery, but at a terrible price, On the slopes around lay more than a thousand dead and dying men.
The Poles had given everything for victory, but it was bittersweet.
It was ultimately success in the valley that sealed the fate of the high ground.
Once the Allies were across the rivers in strength, the Germans' supply route was threatened and Kesselring had no option but to pull back.
That was always the real tragedy of Cassino.
The monastery was a kind of mirage, an obsession that swallowed logic, As the Allies came close enough to touch it, it faded away.
The muddy, bloody Gustav Line was soon left far behind, It had cost the Allies some 100,000 casualties, The Germans suffered a similar loss, A few days later, Clark's troops broke out of the Anzio beachhead, ready to crush the retreating Germans like a nut in a cracker, But the antagonism between Alexander and Clark had one final heartbreaking consequence, Clark, deprived of victory at Cassino, disobeyed Alexander's express wish to encircle the retreating Germans, He didn't close the net, Instead, he led his troops direct to Rome, letting Kesselring's men slip away, On 4th June, Clark made his triumphal entrance, While the citizens of Rome celebrated liberation, news came through of the Normandy landings two days later, Operation Diadem was overshadowed by Overlord and suddenly Italy was back-page news, America pulled out its troops for another front, The Italian campaign should have ended here in Rome, but Clark's action allowed tens of thousands of Germans to escape to a new defence line north of the city, ensuring that the struggle over river and mountain would continue.
But no account of weakness or ambition can diminish the contribution made by the men who earned their Italy stars the hard way.
They endured appalling conditions and they saw terrible sights, but by their courage and perseverance, they pinned down Germans who might have thwarted D-Day, The men here in Italy didn't win the war, but they helped make victory possible.
They'd just spent four months throwing themselves against an extraordinary German defensive position for a questionable victory.
They'd toiled up mountainsides, baked by the sun and buffeted by wind and snow.
They'd forded freezing rivers and marched through miles of mud.
Italy was anything but a holiday.
It was always a controversial campaign, After victory in North Africa, the Allies were split over where to attack Fortress Europe, Churchill finally persuaded the Americans to keep up the pressure on the Germans in Italy, The Allies swept through Sicily and on to the mainland, The demoralised Italians surrendered soon after the first troops landed, It looked like being a short campaign, But Italy is a cruel country for invaders, Sheer mountains form its spiny backbone, Rivers block the line of advance, For the young men sent to fight here, it was a punishing place that would push them to the limits of their endurance, It it was unbelievable.
Always raining or snowing or sleeting.
One was permanently sopping wet.
German opened fire everything they had, they put on us.
Artillery, machine-guns, every It was it was like being in the middle of lightning.
And then the machine-gun bullets sweeping over one's head and sometimes, of course, not always over the head.
We lost a lot of men.
The Germans made the Allies struggle for every mile, The advance stopped at Cassino, On 15th January 1944, weary soldiers of the 5th Army dislodged the Germans from the top of this mountain, Monte Trocchio, They'd fought all the way up from the south, and the last seven miles alone had cost them 16,000 casualties.
As the men hauled themselves up to the crest, they must have been appalled by what they saw across the valley.
The Germans were snug in an apparently impregnable defensive position, They had complete mastery of the road to Rome, which ran up the centre of this valley, To advance north, the Allies would either have to make a dash through the gap or storm the mountain's strongholds, The worst of the Italian campaign was still to come.
Surveying the whole scene was a great monastery which would become the haunting symbol of the war in Italy, Monte Cassino, It was such a vast building and it dominated everything, and it did have that slightly eerie feeling of, er Iooking at you the whole time.
It seemed as though it was looking down on you, it was such an overpowering position up there.
The clouds broke suddenly and you could see the monastery five miles away, perched up on the top of this incredible cliff, dominating everything.
It was here that Hitler's commander in Italy made a stand for the winter, Field Marshal Kesselring, nicknamed Smiling Albert, created a formidable blockade that stretched across Italy from coast to coast, He called it the Gustav Line, The Germans blasted bridges and roads to slow down the Allied advance, They felled hundreds of trees to improve their observation and they mined the whole area, Particularly repellent was this vicious little shoe mine.
It's made of wood, with just the minimum of metal parts to make it hard to find with a mine-detector.
It contains just enough explosive to blow off a man's foot.
The cruel logic of this was that a crippled soldier imposed far more of a burden on his own side than a dead one.
There were thousands of these scattered all around Cassino.
They made the best use of every bit of rock, of cranny, of of caves, and they knew the tracks which we had to use, and they covered all those tracks, both with machine-gun fire and shelling as well.
The Germans dug themselves deep into the hillside, Unless they got a direct hit, they were they were safe down in their in these tunnels.
German ingenuity improved on nature on the slopes above Cassino.
This artificial cave is still littered with the fins of British mortar bombs.
But the cave is so cunningly sited, scooped into the very back of a ridge, that there was just no chance of these being fired into it.
The Germans even had the weather on their side, January 1944 brought one of the worst Italian winters that locals could remember, The advance foundered in the mud, At night, it was dark, cold, wet and miserable.
We had no cover of any kind.
Of course, there were no things like tents or anything.
It was either snowing or blowing or raining and, erm it was a very, very cold time.
The interminable misery of life on the front line was a world apart from the more measured pace of Allied headquarters, The Allied commander-in-chief in Italy was a British officer, General Sir Harold Alexander, He had made his headquarters at the King of Naples'palace at Caserta, an hour's drive from the Gustav Line, This elegant atmosphere was a reflection of the man himself, Harold Macmillan, British resident minister out here, commented that the conversation at Caserta was more likely to be about classical architecture or the best way of driving pheasants in low country than about the war.
Charming and popular, Alexander was a good choice to command the troops of a dozen nations who served under him in Italy, Macmillan wrote admiringly that he didn't give orders, but made suggestions.
This relaxed, easy-going style was a great strength and a great weakness.
Alexander couldn't control his American subordinate, General Mark Clark, commander of 5th Army, Clark was aggressive and vain, His personal ambition was a flaw that would affect his military judgement, The distrust between these two men mirrored a wider Anglo-American divide over the whole worth of the Italian campaign, To the Americans, it was a sideshow wasting men and ammunition, To the British, the struggle was occupying German troops who might otherwise be free to fortify Normandy, The Allies were pulling against each other, and this discord was to have terrible consequences, Churchill knew it was imperative to break the deadlock, He revived an ambitious plan for an amphibious landing at the little ports of Anzio and Nettuno, From there, the Allies could threaten the Gustav Line from behind, "It will astonish the world and it will certainly frighten Kesselring, "Churchill declared, For a soldier, an amphibious landing by night is a risky business, Time and tide are crucially important and bad weather can wreck things before the enemy even fires a shot.
Troops are desperately vulnerable when they hit the beach and thereafter they must depend upon the sea for resupply and reinforcement.
26-year-old Edward Grace was in one of the leading craft approaching Anzio, We expected to get a right royal reception from the Germans.
All the machine-guns would open up at once as we approached the beach, and no doubt there would be heavy artillery fire coming right down onto the Navy, the ships and also, no doubt, some of the shells landing right on top of us on the beach.
Fresh in the minds of the men heading for Anzio was the memory of the near disaster at Salerno the previous September.
There, the Germans had lunged back instantly and almost pushed the Allies into the sea.
But this time, the Germans should have their hands full on the Gustav Line.
Just before the Anzio landing, they were to be distracted by an attack miles away on the Gustav Line, General Clark ordered his battle-scarred 36th Division, a Texas outfit, to cross the river Gari, two miles south of Cassino, and break into the valley beyond, The men had to make the crossing in lightweight assault boats of wood and canvas, They constructed them at a safe distance from the river, The night of 20th January was wet and foggy.
The Texans had to carry their boats almost two miles across a flooded minefield, under shell and mortar fire.
Then they had to paddle across the river, gain handholds on the far bank and hang on until the engineers built bridges.
The Gari may not look much of an obstacle, but it's deep and fast-flowing, especially when swollen by winter rains, Alarmingly, the Texan commander, Major-General Fred Walker, privately thought that the mission was hopeless.
He wrote in his diary "We might succeed, but I don't see how we can, "The crossing is dominated by heights on both sides of the valley "where German observers are ready, "Clark sent me his best wishes, "I think he is worried over the fact that he made an unwise decision," Clark was right to be worried, 900 Americans never even made it to the water, Some boats were damaged and sank, Others capsized as the men climbed in, A few were swept helplessly away, I heard paddles slapping water and hitting together and then the men yelling when their boat turned over.
It curdled your blood to hear those men drown.
Amazingly, some of them made it across here in boats, swimming or on footbridges which were soon smashed.
In the morning, the survivors sheltered in irrigation ditches or flooded foxholes.
The Texans tried again that afternoon, but it was the same dreadful story.
Eventually, the Germans, horrified by the scene, stopped firing and stacked the bodies up like driftwood, The Texas Division lost nearly 1700 men.
It was a write-off.
Many Texans never forgave General Clark, One company commander told a reporter "I had 184 men, "48 hours later, I had 17, "If that's not mass murder, I don't know what is," The diversion at Cassino had failed to pin down the Germans on the Gustav Line, Now the men approaching Anzio were at risk, At last we could feel the crunch of the ship touching the sand underneath, and the ramps came down, and then I as the officer of the platoon jumped into the water.
Edward Grace and his men waded to the beach, bracing themselves for the first burst of machine-gun fire, There was nothing but darkness and there was no sound at all.
The men pushed on into the scrub beyond the beach, Still there was nothing, And then at last there was one single German, erm soldier came running down without any weapons and of course we captured him and asked him.
He was very polite, he spoke half English and half German, and he explained to us that all the all his battalion had been moved and he was left behind because he was repairing a couple of broken-down vehicles.
The Germans had been completely outmanoeuvred, The landing was a spectacular success, Alexander telegraphed Churchill, promising that the American beachhead commander, General John Lucas, would push quickly inland, Churchill replied, "I am very glad you are pegging out claims "rather than digging in beachheads," But General Lucas wasn't pegging out claims, He was confused by contradictory instructions.
Alexander wanted him to push inland and threaten German communications with the Gustav Line.
There'd even been talk of capturing Rome.
But at the last moment, Clark warned him, "Don't stick your neck out, Johnny.
"I did it at Salerno and nearly got my head cut off.
" So Lucas decided to be cautious and built up men and vehicles.
We thought, "Why couldn't we have marched on in those first two days straight to Rome?" There seemed to have been no opposition.
We might just as well have sent the Germans a postcard.
On the third day, 30,000 Germans surrounded the beachhead, All the advantage of surprise had been lost and the sacrifices made in the attacks on the Gustav Line were wasted.
Lucas kept unloading for a full week, He didn't attempt to advance until he'd assembled 70,000 men.
Only now they faced 95,000 Germans.
The Allies were trapped and would remain so for months to come, Churchill was furious, "I expected to see a wildcat roaring through the mountains, "and what do I find? A whale wallowing on the beaches," America even threatened to pull out of Italy altogether, The crisis galvanised Alexander and Clark into action, Both their reputations were at stake, Clark knew he had to keep up the pressure at Cassino to stop the Germans moving even more troops to Anzio, He dared not risk another attack in the valley, He had to take control of the high ground and the monastery itself, He ordered another American division, the 34th, to fight its way onto the massif and capture Monastery Hill, It was an order that must have struck dread into the hearts of the men, And from here we can see just how the monastery dominates everything around it.
A single observer up there could bring artillery fire down on any possible Allied approach.
To the men overlooked by it, the monastery took on a sinister fascination, You had the feeling it Iooked at you and you had no idea how many people were inside looking at you as well.
So you did your best to keep it out of you.
What appeared to the Allies as a malevolent fortress was in fact an internationally important religious site, St Benedict had founded a monastery here in the sixth century, choosing a lofty site for protection, Only, he had chosen too well, Its commanding position had made it a target for every passing army for a thousand years, Now it lay at the heart of the Gustav Line with guns pointing at it from all directions, The Germans were acutely sensitive about the monastery, They'd recently been accused of cultural vandalism when they publicly burnt books from a great library at Naples and now they had the perfect opportunity to restore their reputation.
Though there was more to it than that.
The local German commander was a devout Roman Catholic.
The Germans declared a 300-yard neutral area around the monastery which the Allies agreed to respect, The Americans now had the thankless task of trying to capture the hill without damaging the monastery itself, By 4th February, they'd fought their way onto this ridge, known as Snakeshead, It curved round in a boomerang shape towards the monastery, but the route to it was formidable, It was a place that 20-year-old John Buckeridge would never forget, On one side of the ridge was a sheer drop down into the valley and on the other side were these great clefts, these great cuts in the rock, where you just couldn't go.
I mean, you had to be on the top, and the flat bit was quite narrow, really.
By day, the Americans were pinned down by mortar and machine-gun fire, Each night, half-frozen and reeling with fatigue, they were expected to attack blindly uphill towards the Germans, There are limits to what flesh and blood can stand and the number of Americans up here dwindled day by day.
There was no hope of reinforcement.
All other Allied divisions were at full stretch at Anzio or against the Gustav Line.
At a meeting on 8th February, Alexander told Clark to bring his men down, Clark reluctantly agreed, but delayed the order for three nights in the desperate hope of an American breakthrough, The survivors were traumatised and suffering from exposure, John Buckeridge saw them come down.
They were exhausted.
They had fought themselves to a standstill and they had nothing left in them, in fact, to get on any more, and if they had been asked to get on and attack again, I don't think they had the energy to do it.
Alexander couldn't afford to ease up the pressure on the Germans so he brought in fresh troops from his other army in Italy, the 8th, His multinational force included New Zealanders and Indians as well as French, North Africans and Canadians, The experienced 4th Indian Division would replace the Americans on the ridge, It's difficult to imagine the sufferings of men existing up here on the massif.
They couldn't dig into the rock, so they built these stone shelters.
The British called them sangars.
It was freezing cold, often snowing or raining, and although these gave some protection from German weapons, they gave little against the weather.
During the hours of daylight, men were prisoners up here, unable to put their head over the top without being shot.
The sangars that we took over from the Americans were probably not more than 12 inches or 18 inches high, barely high enough for a person to sit up without their heads protruding over, as we were soon to discover, because soon after first light one of my corporals was shot in the head by a sniper from a ridge about 400 yards away across a valley.
And within the morning, my own batman sitting with me in my own sangar was shot and killed.
John Buckeridge's divisional commander was Major-General Francis Tuker, an outspoken man with a genuine concern for his men, Tuker looked closely at what his men were being asked to do.
They had to attack uphill astride this razor-back ridge.
On one side, it drops away sharply over a precipice.
On the other, it's deeply etched with ravines.
It's barbarous country, and Tuker knew his men would be massacred.
Tuker believed attacking the monastery head-on was a desperate mistake, He badgered his senior commanders to cut through the mountains north of Cassino to sever the German supply route, Although the terrain was even more difficult, it suited the mountain skills of his Indian troops and the Moroccan goumiers of the French Army, But Tuker was ignored, His men would still have to attack the monastery, To improve their odds, he decided to do a little private research, He wanted to find out more about the layout of the building which he believed the Germans were occupying, One afternoon, Tuker drove down to Naples and spent a few hours browsing in the bookshops.
Eventually, he found what he was looking for - a book on the construction of the monastery published in 1879.
What he read convinced him there was only one way of dealing with that mighty fortress with its ten-foot-thick walls, That evening, he fired off a memo to his superior demanding that the monastery should be bombed off the face of the earth.
It was a highly controversial request and it brought Alexander and Clark head to head, Clark, whose decision it was, opposed the bombing because he wasn't convinced that there were Germans inside, But Alexander made it clear that Clark's first duty was to support his men, Clark was forced to back down or be humiliatingly overruled, The all-seeing eye would be put out, The bombing was set for 16th February, when a break in the bad weather was predicted, Beforehand, the Allies dropped leaflets over and around the monastery warning the monks to leave, It was the news most dreaded by the monastery's frail 80-year-old abbot, Gregorio Diamare.
Nothing in his 35 peaceful years of prayer and study in his mountain eyrie had prepared him for the horror of being in the middle of a war zone.
The Germans had forced all but five of his monks to leave, but in recent weeks, the monastery had been overrun by hundreds of terrified civilians in search of sanctuary, They were starving and dying by scores from some virulent disease.
And now their sanctuary was about to become a tomb.
Abbot Diamare asked the Germans for help and was told his flock would be guided to safety on the night of the 15th, But it was the morning of the 15th that an ominous sound was heard, We could hear a droning in the sky and we looked up and we saw a great horde of American Flying Fortresses coming our way.
The American Air Force, taking advantage of the good weather, had gone a day early, but they hadn't told anybody.
The consequences were disastrous for the refugees, We saw the bomb doors open and bombs coming down.
The whole ground shuddered under the great weight of these bombs coming down.
Great er clouds of of dust and smoke came up from the monastery building and one now and again saw great bits of them kind of going into the air as a result of an explosion.
And it really was very frightening.
In the ruins of the monastery lay 200 dead, many of them women and children, The abbot, carrying a cross, Led the shell-shocked survivors into German lines, When all the smoke had cleared and all the dust had cleared, this very regular sort of building had been reduced to ruins with jagged walls, with gaping holes.
But the foundations at the very bottom still appeared to be absolutely intact.
The bombing hadn't been heavy enough to completely obliterate the monastery.
Instead, it had turned it in a labyrinth of ruins, ideal for the German defenders, The Germans occupied it immediately, making the monastery an armed fortress, There could be no more heavy bombing, as it would endanger the Royal Sussex Regiment, who had to follow up with a ground attack, But because the air raid had gone early, they weren't ready, That night, John Buckeridge and a company of just 66 men launched themselves at this rocky crest, Point 593, The height, now crowned with a memorial, barred the way to the monastery.
Once on Point 593, you were being shot at from probably three different directions and you didn't actually know where they were coming from.
Just beyond it, there is a sheer drop, and some soldiers just fell over the top.
Two officers, 32 men, were written off, either wounded or killed or captured that first night.
The next night, they attacked again, this time with 300 men, They tried all night by various means.
Sometimes we got onto Point 593 only for the Germans to open up with all their machine-guns firing and then counter-attacking, and by about two or three in the morning, it was quite clear we just couldn't stay there.
We hadn't done it, we couldn't do it, we just couldn't get on.
After the second night, the Royal Sussex was cut to half its strength, All General Tuker's fears about the folly of attacking along the ridge had been justified, But the commanders wouldn't give up, It was the turn of the Goorkhas, Gordon Shakespear, a 23-year-old officer, had no time to study the terrain, It was a complete ring of fire that came at us as we moved down to the start line.
Apart from that, grenades and mines.
Anti-personnel mines, S-mines, trip-wires the whole area was festooned with them.
As the Germans fired, one Goorkha company made for the only cover, a patch of scrub.
It was booby-trapped and the first men tripped a string of grenades.
Half the leading platoon was blown up.
Others met withering machine-gun fire.
There was no surprise.
The Germans knew we were coming.
Some just got through, but the majority of them were stopped and, er casualties were so heavy that it wasn't worth going on.
Alexander called off the ridge attack, saying that he didn't want another Passchendaele, But Cassino had become a haunting reminder of the Western Front of 1917 - relentless attacks, blasted landscape and human misery, Monte Cassino now dominated the minds not only of the men who lived beneath its shadow but also of their commanders, It seemed to blind them to the reality of what they were asking men to do, The next attack would go straight up the mountain.
First, the attackers would have to take Castle Hill, just behind me.
Then they'd work their way across the front of the mountain to Hangman's Hill, that rocky outcrop on the left, Only when they'd got that could they attack the monastery itself.
Sergeant Bill Hawkins, who'd spent three years in North Africa, now had to make the climb of his life, Making our way up the up the Castle Hill You can understand, with the hill strewn with boulders and thickets, and in the dark, it was raining, the shellfire was terrific and the sniper fire was continuous it was a difficult climb, but we were all sort of pleased that once we'd got up there, we was inside the castle.
The castle itself was a vital link in the chain leading up the massif.
It was viciously counter-attacked by German paras.
The paratroops, one of Hitler's elite forces, had just been sent to strengthen the Cassino defences, They had instructions to hold the line whatever the cost, They had the grenades with long wooden handles and they could throw them quite some distance, but they were throwing 'em up to drop in the castle.
To shoot at those, you've got to put your head up and look over the top of the wall.
That was when you put yourself in the position that somebody could shoot you anyway.
It was a difficult place to defend, really.
The battle took on the fury of a medieval siege, The Essex fired so many mortar bombs that the red-hot barrels began to melt, Then the paras got right up to the castle wall and laid explosives, They blew down part of the wall, Burying more than 20 men of the Essex Regiment.
Then they burst into the courtyard and fought hand to hand.
The battle for Castle Hill reached a new level of ferocity, There was casualties lying all over the ground outside.
There was New Zealand, er German, Goorkha, British.
But it was also the scene of a curious old-fashioned gallantry, In the middle of the battle, the Germans asked for an armistice to collect casualties, Stretcher-bearers from both sides, German and our own, went out and collected in the wounded from outside the castle walls.
We had approximately 14 or 15 German prisoners in the castle.
Some of these volunteered to go out with our stretcher-bearers and bring in the wounded.
The Essex Regiment had held the castle, but they could get no further, We thought we were up high, but the monastery was much, much higher.
I think anybody who managed to get up to the monastery had got to be almost superhuman.
The monastery remained out of reach, All conventional attacks had failed, But there would be one last startling attempt to outsmart the Germans using a forgotten path round the back, Indian engineers had spent weeks turning a goat-track into a road, They'd laid it stone by stone, concealing their activities behind camouflage screens.
At dawn on 19th March, German sentries in a valley behind the monastery were puzzled to hear the sound of a tank, Suddenly it appeared out of the gloom, followed by nearly 40 more, heading straight for the heart of the German position, Robert Frettlhr, a 20-year-old German, rushed to repel the attack, A tank, it's a very scary thing, I can assure you, very, very scary, when you hear 'em.
And they seem to be louder at night-times than what they are during the day.
The Germans were caught completely off guard.
Lesser defenders might have been shaken, but not the paras.
You have to have special equipment which were anti-tank mines, which were like a dinner plate upside down.
If the tank rolls over it, tips the plate, and then there's 70 Ib of dynamite under there, blows the tracks off.
The leading tank hit a mine and blew up, It blocked the road, it were a narrow track and that's how they all got stuck behind one another.
They were trying to get round it, and eventually to get out.
Then they were just picked off as they were trying to escape downhill again.
And that were the whole episode with the New Zealand tanks trying to get up to the monastery.
The Allies had little to show for the thousands of lost lives, The survivors were weary and sick at heart, desperate for deliverance from their living hell, Alexander's cool was shaken by a terse message from Churchill, demanding to know why he kept throwing men against the monastery, Alexander was only too aware that another failure would not be tolerated, Things started to go his way with the arrival of spring, The flooded valleys began to dry out and the river torrents subsided, At last, Alexander had time and weather on his side, and this time he had a proper plan, drawn up here at Caserta by his chief of staff John Harding, Alexander was persuaded that the secret of success lay in launching a mass offensive instead of mounting piecemeal attacks.
Operation Diadem used for the first time the full strength of Alexander's two armies in Italy, the 5th and the 8th, concentrated on a front of just 20 miles, Alexander cloaked everything in secrecy and ordered the preparation of a real smokescreen at Cassino.
Smoke generators like this were manhandled down to the river to mask the construction of 18 bridges.
You light the fuse and it belches out foul smoke for about 15 minutes.
Hundreds of these would create a dense smokescreen that veiled the sun and blinded German observers.
The whole valley were covered in smoke so that the Allies could bring their troops and refreshment and whatever to the front line.
And it were terrible stuff, it used to make you sick when you had to breathe it in.
Hundreds of tanks were smuggled up to the front line, In their place were left dummy tanks made of wood and canvas so that the Germans would not detect any movement, The Allies even managed to smuggle in the 50,000-strong Polish Corps that the Germans thought was miles away, Only one commander was unhappy with Alexander's plan - Mark Clark, He felt angry because Alexander had shifted his 5th Army to the coastal sector, leaving Cassino under British control, He would never be master of Monte Cassino, a snub he wouldn't forget, But the monastery which had cost so many lives was still a target, There was one nation willing to accept the terrible challenge; the Poles, They'd lost their homeland in 1939, carved up between the Germans and the Russians, Now they wanted to remind the world of their existence, Ryszard Kirakowski of the Carpathian Regiment was 22 at Cassino, We were preparing ourselves long time for that encounter with Germans.
We suffer enough during their occupation and there was a time to pay back this other thing.
That was time we were fighting for our freedom.
The Poles, like the Americans and British before them, would attack along Snakeshead Ridge, We knew something were going to happen because, er they used to cover the whole valley in fog every night after night.
But that particular night, on the 11th of May, there were nothing.
It were just clear, er and it was awfully quiet.
As soon eleven o'clock came, suddenly sky became white.
1,600 guns opened fire.
It was I cannot Something spectacular, you know? All of a sudden, he whole sky lit up.
It were just like somebody throwing switches, they're firing, lighting up.
This were the artillery.
It sounded absolutely terrible.
It were just like an earthquake, I should say.
The whole ground shakes with these grenades.
Because the whole mountain were rock.
You look at that and you think, "Well, after that bombardment, "there couldn't be anybody left on German side.
" But of course it wasn't true.
And you just, er laid in your little foxhole and hoped for the best.
After the bombardment, the attacks began, For the first time in the campaign, the Allies outnumbered the Germans three to one, The battle would last for seven days, It's difficult to describe.
Nobody wants to remember shouts and shooting and killing.
That's something dreadful which you do, and you do because you have to do.
If you don't, they will do that to you.
But it's not pleasant when you're killing somebody.
I remember, I always live with that, when German threw hand-grenade on me and I shot him before he fell over his grenade, and grenade exploded over him and I was all covered in his blood.
You see, still I have I am dreaming about it, but it was necessary.
On the sixth day, the German commanders gave the order to retreat, The Gustav Line had been broken some miles away from Cassino, German paratrooper Robert Frettl hr's escape route was back over Monastery Hill, There were a big flash and that's when I got wounded.
And when I woke up, my left leg were ban were damaged.
It were like a balloon and so on, and I crawled into the first-aid post in the monastery.
He was taken prisoner the following morning as the Poles walked unopposed into the monastery, They raised a home-made flag, The Poles were victors of the monastery, but at a terrible price, On the slopes around lay more than a thousand dead and dying men.
The Poles had given everything for victory, but it was bittersweet.
It was ultimately success in the valley that sealed the fate of the high ground.
Once the Allies were across the rivers in strength, the Germans' supply route was threatened and Kesselring had no option but to pull back.
That was always the real tragedy of Cassino.
The monastery was a kind of mirage, an obsession that swallowed logic, As the Allies came close enough to touch it, it faded away.
The muddy, bloody Gustav Line was soon left far behind, It had cost the Allies some 100,000 casualties, The Germans suffered a similar loss, A few days later, Clark's troops broke out of the Anzio beachhead, ready to crush the retreating Germans like a nut in a cracker, But the antagonism between Alexander and Clark had one final heartbreaking consequence, Clark, deprived of victory at Cassino, disobeyed Alexander's express wish to encircle the retreating Germans, He didn't close the net, Instead, he led his troops direct to Rome, letting Kesselring's men slip away, On 4th June, Clark made his triumphal entrance, While the citizens of Rome celebrated liberation, news came through of the Normandy landings two days later, Operation Diadem was overshadowed by Overlord and suddenly Italy was back-page news, America pulled out its troops for another front, The Italian campaign should have ended here in Rome, but Clark's action allowed tens of thousands of Germans to escape to a new defence line north of the city, ensuring that the struggle over river and mountain would continue.
But no account of weakness or ambition can diminish the contribution made by the men who earned their Italy stars the hard way.
They endured appalling conditions and they saw terrible sights, but by their courage and perseverance, they pinned down Germans who might have thwarted D-Day, The men here in Italy didn't win the war, but they helped make victory possible.