advantage to the defender. Monastery Hill itself rose sharply from the town below, standing sentinel and, at 700 feet, a formidable feature for any attacker. Compared with the range of mountains stacked behind it, however, Monastery Hill was just that – a hill – dwarfed by the 5,475-foot-high giant that was Monte Cairo.
In the Liri Valley, the defenders had smashed dikes and diverted water courses to flood large parts of the valley floor and so make it impassable to vehicles, especially heavy trucks and tanks. South of the valley, as far as the sea fifteen miles away, were more mountains: the Aurunci range rising to 5,000 feet – almost as high as the mighty range of the interior. It was along these positions that German engineers and their Italian press-ganged labour force had built a network of bunkers and gun emplacements and laid intricate webs of wire and mines. And it was from here that the defenders had blocked the Allied advance to Rome for more than two months.
When daylight broke the following morning, Hans could just about see the scree-like ruins of the monastery emerging through a thick mist, but the valley floor below and Monte Cairo behind remained completely hidden. As Hans was soon to discover, he had come to one of the most desolate and violent places in the world. The hard rock and precipitous slopes of the mountains and the flooded valley below had blunted the Allies’ superior fire power. At Cassino, each yard – each foot – had to be won or defended by the men unfortunate enough to find themselves thrown into this battle of attrition.
The monastery had been just one of the victims, obliterated by the Allies a week before Hans’ arrival. Other victims from the previous months’ fighting lay scattered and strewn in front of Hans’ machine-gun post; the dead were everywhere. The stench of rotting corpses, bloated and noxious, was overpowering. Hans’ regiment occupied a small ridge known as Hill 445, some 400 yards to the north of the obliterated monastery. By day, Hans and his comrades remained at their post, the constant smoke and dust from shellfire and from British fog canisters shrouding the top of the mountain. By night, they would be able to cautiously slink their way back to the ruined farmhouse that served as company headquarters, or back down the hill to collect ammunition and supplies.
Although Hans’ arrival had coincided with a lull in the fighting, shell and mortar fire, bombing and sniping continued incessantly. Neither side could ever afford to relax; as the German paratroopers had soon learnt, they had to be on their guard at all times. Opposite them were the 1/9th Gurkha Rifles, notorious for their proficiency with kukri knives. Sometimes at night, when less ordnance was hurled back and forth, Hans could hear the screams of his fellow paratroopers as Gurkhas stealthily infiltrated a German outpost, killing – often decapitating – the men with their curved knives. Hans and his comrades hardly dared sleep at night for fear of meeting such a fate: on edge all the time, the strain was immense.
A week before, the battle had begun again in earnest. The morning of 15 March had been clear and sunny, but at around 8.30 a.m. Hans and his unit heard the sound of massed aero engines and then watched open-mouthed as the sky filled with Allied aircraft. They had come to pulverise Cassino town: nearly 800 planes in all, dropping over 1,000 tonnes of bombs. When they had gone, and the dust had settled, the town lay utterly and completely destroyed. The ruins had since proved easier to defend than when the town had been standing, as the New Zealand troops sent in afterwards had discovered at great cost – the Corps losing around 4,000 men. At the same time, the British 4th Indian Division had failed to make headway around Monastery Hill. Hans-Jürgen Kumberg and his comrades had fought hard and valiantly – and had even earned a certain respect from their enemy, who had started to refer to the paratroopers as the ‘Green Devils’.
That evening, 23 March, the British general, Sir Harold Alexander, Commander-in-Chief of Allied Armies in Italy (AAI), drove up to the front line to see the battlefield for himself. The New Zealand commander, General Freyberg, and the US Fifth Army commander, General Mark Clark, had both recommended that the Third Battle of Cassino be called off without delay. Agreeing that any further offensive action was indeed futile, Alexander concurred. The Germans had scored another defensive victory. Difficult though it was to accept in this age of highly mechanised modern warfare, the harsh winter conditions and formidable natural defences of this thin, mountainous country had ensured that the Allies would henceforth have to return to the old summer campaigning season of centuries past.
Curiously though, along theAnzio bridgehead, thirty miles to the northwest, the German Supreme Commander South-West, Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring, was drawing much the same conclusion as his opposite number as he drove along the front and talked with his commanders. It was now two months since the Allies had made their landing at Anzio in Operation SHINGLE. On 22 January, 36,000 American and British troops under the command of US VI Corps had come ashore on the flat land thirty miles south of Rome. Although intended as a means of outflanking the main front along the Gustav Line to the south-east, the shortage of available shipping had ensured that not enough men and equipment had been landed quickly enough to take early advantage of the surprise that had been achieved. The initiative was quickly lost as German troops were hurriedly sent to counterattack, and Allied hopes of forging a link to their forces further south were subsequently dashed.
Anzio, however, had proved equally frustrating for the Germans who had recognised the importance, both psychologically and strategically, of forcing the Allies back into the sea. Generaloberst Eberhard von Mackensen, commander of the German AOK (Armeeoberkommando) 14, whose area of operations included both Rome and the Anzio bridgehead, had for some weeks been suggesting to Kesselring that they should give up any hopes of such a goal. Repeated German counterattacks had been forced back, blunted by the Allies’ superior fire power. Indeed, the night before, as Carla Capponi had lain with Paolo in their hide-out in Rome, they had heard the distant muffled thunder of the guns along the Anzio bridgehead to the south.
The Allies may have managed to cling on to their small gains, but for the American and British troops trapped there, the Anzio bridgehead had proved a hellish place, with the men enduring conditions akin to those of the Western Front in the previous war. The landscape all along the front was now witness to a terrible desolation. Villages and towns lay utterly flattened. Areas of thick pine forest stood splintered and shorn. The earth was pockmarked by shell crater after shell crater; the soil churned into thick, glutinous mud by the sheer scale of exploding ordnance and labouring Allied vehicles. As Ray Saidel – a nineteen-year-old private with the US 1st Armored Regiment – had discovered, artillery dominated every aspect of their lives. His friends and comrades around him all shared the same look: deep-set hollow eyes from lack of sleep, and the ‘Anzio Crouch’ – the way they walked so as to be ready to throw themselves flat on the ground the moment a shell whistled nearby.
For the troops trapped in the Anzio enclave, there were two ways of existing and both were underground. The first was in large dugouts each holding about five men, where there was plenty of company but only a comparatively thin roof because the hole was too wide to support anything heavy. The second option was to dig a tiny foxhole about six-feet long, like a coffin, but with an entrance at an angle at one end. Ray liked his buddies well enough but he also wanted to stay alive, so he opted for the one-man foxhole, dug beside a felled pine tree. He covered it with branches and wood and mud, and discovered that at the end of every night’s shelling, as more and more branches and debris landed on top, his roof became thicker and thicker, and therefore more secure.
However, although he felt safe enough in there, at just three feet deep it was hardly comfortable; any lower and the water level would have flooded the floor. He could just about lie there and read a book by the light of a small candle dug into the side. Sharing this miserable shelter was a stray puppy. The dog had become something of a lucky mascot as it could hear approaching shells coming long before Ray and his comrades could, and would immediately take cover.
By day, Ray would travel by jeep down the notorious ‘Bowling Alley’, a long, highly exposed and extremely hazardous disused railway line that led to the forward area. There, in a sunken road, were five tanks from his own Company G, hunkered down amongst the infantry. Ray’s task was to take messages from
