HistoryThe battle of Monte Cassino was one of the greatest human tragedies of the second World War. For despite losses on a 1914-18 scale, the battle had little or no impact on the outcome.
Its genesis lay largely in Churchill's demented belief that there was a shortcut to victory over Germany. This had caused him, almost single-handedly, to initiate the Gallipoli campaign a generation before. By 1943, his obsession with easy victories had shifted to Italy, with his fatuous description of the peninsula as the "soft underbelly" of Europe.
As soldiers say of distant, demanding commanders, "fat fingers, small map". Italy is one of the most uncongenial landscapes for offensive operations in the world. The Apennines, which run its length, and the rivers and gullies that ripple from this central spine, nullified all the Allies' technological advantages and made the theatre a defenders' paradise. Faced by an enemy on a mountain or beyond a water-course, a tank is simply a tracked tomb.
What little public memory there is of Cassino is of the destruction of the abbey, one of the birthplaces of Western civilisation. It was and remains a shocking affair, but judgment about the rights and wrongs can only be placed in the context of a world war in which thousands of men were dying like ants in the hills around it. Allied soldiers were convinced it contained Germans, though it didn't; but what is certain is that it was an integral part of the main German defensive structure in Italy, the Gustav Line.
Almost as abysmal as the bombing of St Benedict's great monastery was the Allied ineptitude overall. The Germans were far superior to their foes, apart from the French, many of whom had recently been fighting against the Allies in North Africa. This brings us to perplexing issues of motivation: why should French-colonial troops - Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian - have fought so much better than their British or American counterparts?
One answer is leadership. The finest Allied commander was Gen Alphonse Juin, a man of dynamism and great soldiering intelligence. The other Allied generals couldn't compare. The army group commander, Gen Alexander, was at best a good battalion commander. The theatre commander, Maitland Wilson, was a shallow buffoon. The US general, Mark Clark (commander, Fifth Army), was a vainglorious and treacherous Anglophobe, more interested in outdoing the British than in saving his men's lives.
And in Gen Senger und Etterling, the Germans possessed the finest leader in the theatre (and later the author of one the most brilliant autobiographies of the war).
Juin knew that it was madness to assault the German lines at Cassino; the most outstanding British general, "Gertie" Tuker (Fourth Indians) agreed with him; both wanted to ignore the abbey and instead launch wide flanking attacks on the Germans. Together they might have halted the madness, but Tuker was taken ill and invalided out, and so the lunatic assaults around the monastery continued from January through to May, with some 350,000 casualties.
This horror continues to fascinate aficionados of military ineptitude and stoic soldiery: 20 years ago it inspired John Ellis to produce his masterpiece, Cassino, and Matthew Parker follows pretty much the same contours. In accordance with modern tastes, he dwells more on the backgrounds of the common soldier: these are only marginally germane to Cassino, for they would largely hold whether or not the battle had been fought.
It's puzzling that Parker doesn't mention the all-Japanese 100th battalion of the US 34th Division, which fought with great distinction at Cassino; nor does he mention the 78th (Irish) Brigade, amongst the finest in the British Army, especially since he lists Richard Doherty's splendid history of the unit, Clear the Way (Irish Academic Press) in his bibliography.
Many Japanese and Irish boys perished in the atrocious hillsides around Cassino; most of the really terrible fighting occurred not at the abbey walls but in the range of mountains nearby, in conditions, mixing the Arctic with Flanders, which simply defy description.
The purpose of the battle was ultimately to destroy or entrap the main German armies in Italy; but with the abbey finally in Allied, namely Polish, hands, instead of closing down the German bolt-hole at Valmontone, as ordered, Clark rushed his Fifth Army in to capture an undefended Rome. He got the world headlines he wanted, just in time, the day before the Normandy landing, but thereby enabling the Germans to scramble to safety through the gap he had left. This was a crime worthy of the firing-squad.
Matthew Parker's Monte Cassino is not as outstanding a military history as Ellis's magisterial volume; but it is deeply felt, and his obvious moral need to honour the plain bloody infantry as well as the poor bloody Italian peasantry has enabled him to paint on a broader, more human canvas than Ellis. A fine book on a heartbreaking tragedy.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist and novelist
Monte Cassino By Matthew Parker Headline, 456pp. £20