ANNIVERSARIES
from issue no. 03 - 2004
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The destruction of Montecassino
On 8 May, sixty years ago, the battle of Cassino ended, one of the hardest and most irrational of the Second World War. It cost thousands of human lives and the destruction of the abbey of Montecassino founded by Saint Benedict. “A beacon of European civilization”, President Ciampi has defined it, bombed by the Allies “because of a tragic error, the fruit of a bad interpretation”. This is what happened
by Roberto Rotondo
The cover of Domenica del Corriere of 27 February 1944
This year the abbey of Montecassino, which was rebuilt after the war exactly as it had been, commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the bombardment and the tragic battle with a series of events. The President of the Italian Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was there on 15 March. He went up to the monastery where he meditated in silence for three minutes in homage of the victims of the terrorist attack in Madrid five days before, took part in a mass and, then, in the piazza of Cassino devoted his speech to the sufferings of the areas during the last war. Sufferings which, after the war, only the book La Ciociara and the film made from it “had the courage to recount”, Ciampi said. Adding: “These events demonstrate an evil which no philosophy of history can manage to mitigate. In the Second World War, unfortunately, there were many such. The destruction of Cassino is one of them.” Furthermore, Ciampi continued, “nobody could ever forgive the destruction of what had been for more than a thousand years a beacon of European civilization, the abbey of Saint Benedict”. And the head of State returned twice more to the bombardment of the Benedictine monastery: “It was a tragic error, the result of poor intelligence”.
Exactly sixty years later the US and England also admit it was “a tragic error”. But how and why did the bombardment take place?
an American “Flying Fortress” over the abbey 15 February 1944
Let us reconstruct the happenings, which have many analogies with the wars and military operations of our own days. It began on 15 February 1944, when, at 9:24 in the morning, the abbey of Montecassino was shaken by a tremendous explosion which shattered the prayers of the small group of Benedictine monks in the monastery as they were invoking the help of Our Lady and reciting “et pro nobis Christum exora”. Among them was the eighty year old abbot Dom Gregorio Diamare and his secretary Dom Martino Matronola, who was afterwards to publish a diary which is indispensable for a proper understanding of those dramatic days. Out of the sky, and onto their heads and those of the hundreds of refugees in the monastery, came a cluster of 250 kg bombs dropped by a bomber with the ominous number 666, piloted by Major Bradford Evans, who was leading the first of the four formations of B-17, the Flying Fortresses, which had been ordered to destroy the thousand year old monastery perched on the hill. Four other waves of medium-range bombers followed the Flying Fortresses. At 13:33 it was all over: all the monks were safe, but several hundred refugees had died beneath the bombs, and it was to be difficult, even after the war, to dig out the bodies and put a name on the grave markers.
A change of scene. Washington 16:00 hours the same day, in Italy it was past 22:00 hours. About twelve hours had passed since the bombing and American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened a press conference with these words: “I read in the afternoon papers about the bombing of the abbey of Montecassino by our forces. In the reports it was clearly explained that the reason why it was bombed is that the Germans were using it to bombard us. It was a German stronghold, with artillery and everything necessary”. The American president seemed sure of himself, as the Anglo-American newspapers seemed sure: The air force strikes the Germans on Montecassino, was the headline of The New York Times that day. Roosevelt perhaps could not know that he was to be clamorously refuted by history, but he could hardly not see that there was something bizarre about the business. Even in a world at war for years and for which death and destruction were daily fare. In fact, bombers had never had a historical monument as prime target, what’s more in neutral territory, the property of the Holy See, a monastery famous throughout the Christian world, a place where priceless historic and artistic treasures were kept. Furthermore, the force used was out of all proportion: 453 tons of bombs dropped, in eight waves, by 239 bombers. A monstrous figure. How would American Catholics take it when in few months later they were to vote to elect the president of the United States. Finally “the most publicized bombing of a single target in history”, as Newsweek defined it, was that day the headline of the newspapers of half the world. What might the political consequences be, who would win the propaganda battle? Roosevelt had a communiqué from Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander-in-Chief of Allied forces in Europe, till then confidential, circulated to journalists. It stated that if in the course of the advance it became necessary “to choose between the destruction of a famous monument and the sacrifice of our soldiers, then our soldiers’ lives will count infinitely more”. But, Ike explained, the choice was not simple. Because neither personal convenience, nor laxity nor indifference might be concealed behind the expression “military necessity”. But it was too little to avoid a negative reaction on public opinion in Europe.
A media defeat
Nazi propaganda, in fact, was about to go into a wild exploiting of the bombing to its own favor. In Nazi-held Europe the Anglo-Americans were to be depicted in the days following the bombing as the new barbarians who were eager to systematically cancel every trace of “superior European civilization”. The abbey of Montcassino, which had been destroyed three times in the past - by the barbarians, the Saracens and by an earthquake - was now reduced to dust “by the Jews and by the Bolshevik fellow-travellers of Moscow, London and Washington”. But that was not enough, because Nazi intelligence – which according to the reports of D’Arcy Osborne, the British ambassador in the Vatican, had for some time been spreading reports that it was the presence of their troops in the abbey that provoked Allied bombing – had an easy job in promoting the Germans as defenders of civilization: it had in fact been the Hermann Göring division which in December 1943 had brought to safety in the Vatican all the moveable works of art in the abbey, along with the immense library and its incalculably valuable codices.
The regard felt by General Frido von Senger, commander of the XVI Panzerkorps, for the Benedictines and the historical monument played a particularly influential part in that rescue operation. Senger, a Catholic, for many years close to the Order of Saint Benedict, belonged to the minor nobility of Southern Germany who were against the Nazis, but obedient to orders. Senger, who commanded the entire Gustav line, had also fundamentally respected the neutrality of the place and had not allowed his troops, deployed over the whole mountain, to take up position within 300 meters of the abbey walls, the belt marking off the neutral zone.
Some children of Cassino among the ruins of their houses destroyed by the battle
After the bombing Roosevelt, like Winston Churchill in London, decided therefore to defend the good intentions behind the decision of the Allied commands in the Mediterranean. Not only because the advance on Rome was in a very delicate phase (the Allied troops in the Liri valley were blocked while in the area of Anzio they were actually in danger of being driven back into the sea), but also because English General Henry Maitland Wilson, the Allied commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, claimed he had “irrefutable evidence” of the presence of the enemy in the abbey before the bombing. And when on 9 March, the English Foreign Office asked Wilson if he could provide an explanation backed by fact to the Vatican as to why the monastery was destroyed, despite the wholesale promises given to the Holy See about respecting the abbey, Wilson stated that he had at least twelve pieces of “irrefutable evidence” about the military use of the monastery by the Germans, but he also wanted to keep them secret to prevent the Germans from constructing false counter evidence in consequence. It was promised that the evidence would be given to the Vatican in due time. That time has never arrived: even after the war it took investigation and controversial historical studies on documents in the military archives to conclude that it was the result of an error. One of Wilson’s irrefutable pieces of evidence was detailed after the war by one of the people involved, Captain David Hunt, aide to British Field-Marshal Harold Alexander, commander-in-chief of the Allied armies in Italy. Hunt recounted how, shortly after the bombardment, the translation of an intercepted Nazi message was passed on to him. It said: “Ist der Abt noch im Kloster?” and the reply was “Ja”. Abt was translated as the abbreviation of “military division”, so the phrase was taken to mean: “Is the division in the monastery?”. “Yes”. It also seemed to Hunt the confirmation of their suspicions, the classic “smoking gun” as we would call it today. But Abt also means ‘abbot’. And, Hunt went on, all one had to do was to read further to understand that the Germans were speaking about the monks in the abbey and not about their troops. However, Hunt says, it was too late to abort the mission. How could such a gross mistake be made? One also has to keep in mind that the secret services very often see and hear that which they think will please those in command. And it was the case here also: though it was later proved that there were no Germans, Lieutenant Herbert Marks, of Allied counter-intelligence, who had been observing the monastery through a telescope, claimed he had seen around seventy of them run from the gate of the abbey to the courtyard. And a message of the Fifth Army at 11:00 hours, after the first wave of B-17s, reported: “Two hundred Germans fleeing from the monastery along the road”.
President of the Italian Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and his wife Franca on a visit to the abbey of Montecassino accompanied by the abbot Don Bernardo D’Onorio, 15 March 2004
But who decided that Montecassino should be destroyed? The book Montecassino by David Hapgood and David Richardson (recently republished by Baldini Castoldi Dalai), the outcome of long research in the military archives, states that there is no evidence to show that the decision was made at a level higher than General Wilson and General Alexander. It is a fact that the final decision to bomb the abbey was never acknowledged by anyone on the ladder, from the Allied political leaders, through the General Staff, down to the commanders in the field. Only one general has gone down in history as a convinced proposer of the need to destroy Montecassino: Bernard Freyberg. The commander of the New Zealand contingent, who had taken up position with his men in the Liri valley early February, was famous in New Zealand, but even those who admired his courage admitted that he had difficulty conceiving a more complex strategy than that of a bull charging a gate. So he found himself almost immediately in agreement with his superior Mark Clark on the plan to attack up Montecassino mountain, despite the fact that for weeks already this plan promised only tremendous losses. Indeed, from the start Freyberg blamed the abbey for the failure to break through the German lines since, according to him, the Germans were directing their artillery fire from there. So 12 February came, the day on which Freyberg, insistently demanded the bombing of the monastery for reasons of “military necessity”, even threatening the withdrawal of his troops were he not contented. Clark was not in agreement both for political and military reasons, but he was in a weak position. The defeat suffered by the Texas division on 20 January still weighed heavily on his reputation. His order to cross the river Rapido resulted in the useless sacrifice of almost two thousand soldiers, and the news of the defeat had gone around the world. Furthermore, as Clark writes in his book of memoirs At war with Alexander, ranked above him were two English generals, and Alexander himself said to him about the bombing: “Freyberg is a very famous figure in the Commonwealth, we treat him with kid gloves and you must do the same”. If we add to this is the fact that almost all the English and American press had been engaged for some time in a devastating campaign in which they claimed that their soldiers were paying with their lives for the kindness of the military commanders toward the Catholic Church, and that “A victory won is better than a Michelangelo on the wall”, one understands why Clark gave in and gave the green light to the bombers. Not before dropping handbills on the monastery to warn the inhabitants of the threat from above. For the refugees it was a death sentence, both because right up to the end no one wanted to believe it could come to that, and because they had no way out, surrounded as they were for miles around by two battling armies.
What remained of the abbey at the end of the battle
By one of those imponderable paradoxes that the history of the Church can proffer, the son of the man who wanted the destruction at all costs of one of the most significant monuments of Christendom, was saved in those days by the hospitality of a convent of nuns in Castel Gandolfo. They hid the young Freyberg, a lieutenant of infantry, after he escaped from the Germans who had captured him at Anzio. Castel Gandolfo was among those properties of the Church which, even though in a neutral zone, were bombed in those months for the same reasons used to justify the destruction of the abbey of Montecassino: “military necessity”. But perhaps not even the fate of his son would have changed the mind of general Bernard Freyberg, seeing that he did not give up the idea of the bombing even when he realized the day before the planes took off that it was useless from a military point of view since his men, pinned down by the German forces, were too far from the objective and would never be able to take the ruins of the abbey before the enemy. Air force command refused to postpone the bombardment since from 16 February the planes were detailed to operate in the Anzio area. Freyberg therefore decided to go ahead and the consequences are in the history books, as well as in the many war cemeteries afterwards established in the area. Freyberg had many more bombers at his disposal than required because the US air force exploited the occasion to settle an old debate: whether daytime bombing was more effective, as they maintained, than night-time, favored by the English.
The Germans, as the New Zealand commander had also foreseen, occupied the ruins first and the battle in the valley and on the mountain waged fiercely again. The town of Cassino was bombed in the following weeks, making it impossible for the American tanks to advance, blocked as they were by the craters made by the bombs from their own planes and their own artillery. There was no end to the expenditure of resources. A hill was even re-christend “One million hill”, because it was calculated by the artillery that to kill a single enemy soldier had cost 25,000 dollars in ammunition. “Perhaps it would have been simpler if they had offered that sum”, the famous war correspondent Ernie Pyle, bitterly wrote, “to the Germans to leave”.
