Books: At the Monastery

THE BATTLE OF CASSINO (309 pp.)—Fred Majdalany — Houghfon Mlfflin ($4).

The action started out as another ridge-and-river crossing by the victorious Fifth Army as it drove up the length of Italy. An optimistic intelligence summary said that German power was “ebbing.” The attack was to be timed with the Anzio landing, 60 miles behind the German front at Cassino, trapping the Germans between two fires. Instead, it was the Allies who were trapped. This book ably retells the story of the trap and of what it took to pry it open again—in one of the great battles of World War II.

The Eyes of Texas. The Germans swiftly contained the Anzio beachhead, and Cassino proved to be a cork, bottling up the Allies for four months, until the pressure built up by 16 divisions, 1,600 artillery pieces, 2,000 tanks and 3,000 aircraft burst it asunder. Soldiers by the thousands died trying to scale the 1,700 feet of Monte Cassino. Men of the 36th (Texas) Division splashed through flooded meadows thickly sown with mines, suffered such losses attempting to cross the Rapido River that their morale went to pieces (they demanded a congressional inquiry of their leaders). Gurkhas coming out of the front lines were so shaken that their “eyes stare without seeing, and fatigue seems to have become a skin disease.”

In the fourth and final attempt to storm Cassino, 13 divisions of the Fifth and Eighth Armies, backed by overwhelming fire and airpower, smashed into the four German divisions clinging to the shattered defenses. At first the Germans held on, then retired to the north. It was only half a victory: Cassino had fallen, but the German Tenth Army got away.

The Real Enemy. Author Fred Majdalany, a British newspaperman, fought at Cassino (with the Lancashire Fusiliers) and has already used it as the scene of a novel (The Monastery). His descriptions of tactics and close-in fighting are masterly, his assessment of the principals sometimes harsh. He censures Winston Churchill for repeated interference with the generals in the field, and he charges U.S. General Mark Clark with publicity-seeking, buck-passing, and an inferiority complex. His favorites are Britain’s General Sir Harold Alexander (“the embodiment of all that is most admired in the English character”) and the U.S. commander at Anzio, General Lucian Truscott (“the best American general in Italy”).

The battle may well be remembered longer for the Allied destruction of the historic monastery (founded A.D. 529) that crowned Monte Cassino than for the men who fought and died there. Author Majdalany concedes that there were probably no German troops within the monastery precincts, and that militarily the buildings were nearly as strong in ruins as they were intact, could serve equally well as an observation post. But he still feels that the bombing had to be done, if only because “in the cold desolation of winter and the fatiguing travail of unresolved battle, the spell of its monstrous eminence was complete and haunting . . . To the soldiers dying at its feet, the Monastery had itself become in a sense the enemy.”