Last week, I met some old men from Austria. They did not speak English, nor I German; but we understood one another well enough. Grief and rage poured from them as they cast their minds back to the battlefield of Monte Cassino in 1944, where nearly 60 years on they remembered their dead friends and colleagues. They repeatedly spat only two words that I understood: krieg and scheisse, writes Kevin Myers
Monte Cassino commands the two roads between Naples and Rome. Here Hawaiian-Japanese, Indian, Nepalese, Canadian, New Zealander, American, French, Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan, Senegalese, Italian, British and Irish met the German, Austrian, Czech and Polish soldiers of the Third Reich. Here sworn enemies learnt to respect each other in one of the most titanic and dreadful battles in the second World War: and here, if there is a hell, one man at least booked his certain place in it.
Whirlwinds of shrapnel
This is a place where towering peaks in all directions and the volcanic bedrock of the surface ensured that there is no safety about any axis. Foxholes were impossible to dig: moreover, any shell exploding on the lava surface created local whirlwinds of lethal shrapnel.
Yet positions once taken had to be held by soldiers who lay in the open through the long arctic nights of January through to March, as blizzards, frosts and torrential icy downpours imposed their unforgiving tyrannies on the stone ramparts that rise giddily above the Liri Valley. Men crouched motionless by day in the tiny hollows they had scooped at night, often soiling themselves where they lay rather than betray their position to enemy snipers in the heights above them.
In succession they came. First, the gallant 34th Division of the US army, clawing its way towards the peak of Hill 593; and unable to conquer the heights, they clung instead to the open hillside, unrelieved for nearly a month from mid-January onwards. Many soldiers went without hot food for their entire tenure there, and when ordered to withdraw to make way for men of the 4th Indian Division, were too weak to move, having to be borne by stretcher back to their own lines.
The 36th US Division, locally recruited National Guardsmen from the small towns of Texas, was squandered on the steep slopes and fast-flowing waters of the Rapido River, entire companies vanishing and drowning in the icy torrents. The few survivors of the assault perished on the far bank and in the dark within the cones of intersecting fire from German machine guns. And they died in vain, for the Germans were barely aware that a major offensive against them had even been occurring.
Weeks later came the New Zealanders and the 4th Indian Division, forging across rivers and storming those unforgiving heights whose peaks remained inviolable. Gurkhas, Maoris, white New Zealanders, and soldiers from the Punjab, Mahratta, Baluch, Rajputana, Essex and Sussex, fought to take over from the brave, wretched Americans, but achieving little or no success to speak of, and yet again enduring unspeakable privations and casualties.
Brigadier Pat Scott
Then, this month 58 years ago, it was the turn of the 78th British Division, containing perhaps the best British infantry Brigade in Italy, the 38th (Irish), consisting of the 2nd London Rifles, the 6th Inniskilling Fusiliers, and 2nd Irish Fusiliers. Their job was firstly to hold the line against endless probing German counter-attack, in the filth and decay of their own waste and the dead bodies of their comrades. But ultimately, their duty was finally to force their way through the fortified German positions of the Gustav line.
This was done, in May 1944, in a battle plan devised by Brigadier Pat Scott from Donegal. It was a brilliant feat of arms, coinciding with the Polish assault on the famous monastery. Many good Irishmen perished in this offensive. One of them, Jimmy Barnes of Monaghan, was recommended for a Victoria Cross by his company commander, Desmond Woods from Castlewellan. Another men to fall in the assault was Corporal Edward O'Reilly, a holder of the Military Medal, from Arva, Co Cavan.
Death is a price soldiers pay, and are willing to pay, for victory; and that victory could only be measured in the destruction or the capture of the German panzer-grenadier and parachute divisions being driven back from Monte Cassino towards waiting allied troops of the US Fifth Army, which had landed behind them at Anzio in January.
"Liberation" of Rome
But Lt-Gen Clark of the Fifth Army knew that the Normandy landings were imminent, and the focus of the world would no longer be on him. Instead of ambushing the retreating German armies, he turned his forces towards the undefended city of Rome, which he took without a shot being fired. The photograph of him "liberating" an open city filled the newspapers of the world on June 5th, 1944, and allied guns were silenced for a couple of minutes so that cine-news footage would suggest that total victory had been achieved.
Thus, by this single, vainglorious deed, Mark Clark become a four-star general. Thus did the war-hardened German armies escape to form and fight at the Gothic Line, upon whose iron battlements thousands more Allied troops were soon to perish. Thus the bloody battles of Monte Cassino came to have been fought in vain. Thus did the destruction of the ancient monastery of St Benedict transpire to be quite purposeless. Thus did General Mark Clark, US Army, book himself a place in the eternal flames of hell. And thus were my weeping Austrians proved right: Der Krieg ist scheisse.