cause for Naples. This seemed to work. She felt calmer suddenly, so that when one of them asked her sharply why she was carrying a raincoat on such a hot day, she told them that it was her fiancé’s and that she had had a stain removed from it and was going to give it back to him.
She then saw Pasquale start towards her. What was the time? She asked the policemen: 2.47 p.m. one of them told her. In that case, she said, it was time for her to go. Hurrying away from them, she passed Pasquale who muttered something she could not make out, but knowing she could not look back and believing Pasquale’s message was the signal for her to move, she turned into the Via del Tritone and then down Quattro Fontane to take up her position for the attack.
At the top of Via Rasella, Carla saw Paolo sweeping the road half way down the street, the dustcart in the middle of the road. She had been expecting to see the SS column marching into the bottom of the street but there was still no sign. She could not think what had gone wrong. One of only twelve partisans from GAP Central, she was well aware that their chances of pulling off such an attack and then successfully escaping were not high. Life in Rome was becoming increasingly dangerous with not only the Gestapo closing in on them but also the Neo-Fascist secret police. There was also a particularly vicious gang of Fascist vigilantes, which had been set up soon after the German occupation the previous autumn as a counter-partisan ‘Special Police Unit’. Known as the Koch Gang after its leader, Pietro Koch, the band was already a byword for ruthlessness and brutality, known for the particular vindictiveness with which they tortured those who fell into their grasp.
The growing dangers had done little to deter the Gappists, but all of the partisans in GAP Central, Carla included, were very aware that their planned attack in the Via Rasella was the most daring strike attempted yet. The night before, lying next to Paolo in their hide-out, she had needed to remind herself why she was taking part in such an action. In the silence and dark, she had thought of how unjust the war was, and of the destruction and devastation it had caused to her country. She thought of her compatriots who had already been shot and tortured and of all those who had been deported and who had not been heard of since; and she thought of all those friends of hers who had already died in the fighting in Russia, in Greece, in Yugoslavia; she remembered her cousin, Amleto, killed fighting the Allies at El Alamein. But while such thoughts had helped stiffen her resolve, her fears remained. If they were caught, she knew they would be killed.
At the top of the Via Rasella, in the garden of the Palazzo Barberini, Carla spotted some children playing football. Imagining the horrors of the children being caught in the bomb blast she walked over and shouted at them, ‘You can’t play football in this garden. Go home and do your homework!’ Recognising something in her tone, they all immediately scurried off.
The minutes ticked by. Still nothing. What could have gone wrong? As she waited by the gates of the Palazzo Barberini the same two plainclothes policemen approached her again. It was now just after 3.30 p. m., more than an hour and a half after the bomb was supposed to have gone off. ‘You still here?’ they asked her. Her fiancé was at the Officer’s Club in the Palazzo, she told them, desperately hoping they would not see Paolo and his rubbish cart a hundred yards up ahead. She couldn’t go in there, she explained, as it was men only, and so had to wait. ‘We’ll wait with you,’ they told her.
Carla was almost at her wits’ end when she spotted an elderly friend of her mother’s on the other side of Quattro Fontane. Excusing herself from the two policemen, she hurried across the road and after a very brief conversation, whispered to her to get away as quickly as possible.
It was at that moment that she saw one of the other partisans walking down the street towards Paolo. As he passed, Carla finally spotted the head of the column of SS men turn into the bottom of the Via Rasella. Her heart in her mouth, she watched them gradually fill the entire street, tramping rhythmically – though not singing as usual – towards Paolo and the dustcart, until he was lost from view, engulfed by the marching column.
She was still straining to see him when he suddenly appeared by her side. The front of the column was now near the top of the Via Rasella. She gave him the raincoat, which he hastily put on over his overalls, just as Carla saw the two plainclothes policemen, who had not stopped watching her, begin to cross the street. She pulled out her pistol but a passing bus came between them.
And then the bomb detonated.
The explosion rocked the entire city centre. A violent blast of air followed, pushing Carla and Paolo forward and knocking the bus, directly in front of the Via Rasella, across the street. The policemen fled and Carla and Paolo sprinted in the opposite direction, gunfire and bullets from the troops at the head of the column pinging and ricocheting all around them and bits of stone and stucco from the buildings showering them as they ran. Behind them mortars exploded, but they both kept running, sprinting for their lives until the sounds of the inferno at last began to die down.
That same Thursday in March 1944 was proving to be a significant day on the main front line as well. Just over sixty miles to the south-east of Rome, lay the town of Cassino, and towering above it, the remains of the sixth-century Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino. Emerging from the high and jagged peaks that stretched east to the Adriatic coast and overlooking the flat Liri Valley before the mountains rose once more to the western coast, Monte Cassino held the key to the route to Rome and was the single most important point in the German ‘Gustav Line’, a defensive barrier than ran like a belt across the waist of Italy.
Since January, the Allies had repeatedly tried to force their way through, but the formidable defences had prevented them. Indeed, as the dust and debris of the blast in the Via Rasella began to settle that sunny spring afternoon, the Allies were about to call a halt to their third attempt to break Cassino and Monastery Hill above.
That the Allied attack was now almost beaten had much to do with the tenacious defending by the German 1st Parachute – or Fallschirmjäger – Division. Amongst these defenders was Hans-Jürgen Kumberg, a nineteen-year-old paratrooper born in Ventspils, Latvia to German parents. In 1939, as Russia was soon to occupy the Baltic States, the family moved to Posen in German-occupied Poland, and it was here, in June 1943, that Hans finished school. Inspired by a film about the Fallschirmjäger’s action over Crete in May 1941, he promptly, aged just seventeen, volunteered to become a paratrooper himself. Before Christmas, having successfully completed his training, he was posted to the Adriatic where the Fallschirmjäger were still defending Ortona. It had been a month since Hans and the division had arrived at Monte Cassino, in time for the Third Battle of Cassino.
The German defenders had fought with almost insane bravery and determination since the moment the Allies had landed at Salerno the previous September. Almost every yard had been bitterly contested as the defenders had fallen back across rivers, through mountains and networks of mines, booby traps and wire. Through November and December, they had successfully held the Allies at bay along the narrow Mignano Gap, a mere ten miles south-east of Cassino, before retreating in January to their well-prepared defences of the Gustav Line, along which Cassino was the key position. Helped by a particularly wet and cold winter, they had in that first month of the new year, and again in February, barred the Allies from bludgeoning their way through to the wider valley beyond that led to Rome. The first two battles of Cassino had seen some of the most bitter and bloody fighting of the war to date.
In the four long weeks since his arrival at Cassino, Hans had not had a chance fully to grasp just how high up he was in the mountains, or how dominant was the monastery that overlooked the Liri Valley below. His division had reached the town in the dead of night on 20/21 February. Arriving at the foot of Monastery Hill, they had then disembarked from their trucks and walked as silently as they could – despite their heavy packs and equipment – up through a steep gully to a ridge about a mile beyond and above the remains of the monastery. It was wet underfoot and bitterly cold and the climb a difficult one; yet, whatever the difficulties of hauling equipment and supplies high into the Cassino massif, there was
