• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1165 0

and blew up almost to a man. Colonel Showers fell shot in the stomach. Two-thirds of the leading company was struck down within five minutes, yet the survivors continued to force their way forward. Riflemen were found afterwards with as many as four trip-wires around their legs. Naik Birbahadur Thapa, although wounded in many places, managed to burst through the scrub and seize a position … Stretcher-bearer Sherbadur Thapa made sixteen trips across this deadly ground before he was killed. An unscathed handful battled on until ordered to withdraw. Seven British officers, four Gurkha officers and 138 other ranks had fallen.’ In six weeks, 4th Indian Division suffered more than 4,000 casualties. Its own officers conceded that as a fighting formation it was never the same again.

Spirits were no higher on the other side of the hill. ‘I feel that much will be written in the future about these battles,’ wrote Sergeant Franco Busatti, a member of a fascist pioneer unit still serving alongside the Germans, ‘and I am curious to know the answers of tomorrow to the “why” of today.’ Swept along in the retreat of Kesselring’s army, he was struck by the contrast between Italian soldiers, chronically disordered, and the Germans, disciplined even in defeat. ‘The war will be won by either the Germans or the English and Americans,’ he wrote fatalistically. ‘The Italians are irrelevant.’ Like many of his countrymen, Busatti eventually decided that he owed allegiance to neither side: deserting the battlefield, he took refuge with his family at their home in Città di Castello until the end of the war.

For the Allies, however, there was an iron imperative to renew the assault. Captain Henry Waskow, a twenty-five-year-old Texan, led his diminished company on a night attack against one of innumerable German mountain positions, known only as Hill 730, on the moonlit night of 14 December 1943. ‘Wouldn’t this be an awful spot to get killed and freeze on the mountain?’ he murmured wryly to his runner. He felt a sudden yearning for toast. ‘When we get back to the States, I’m going to get me one of those smart-aleck toasters where you put the bread in and it pops up.’ A few seconds later, he was mortally wounded by a shell fragment when the Germans spotted the advancing Americans. Waskow left behind a letter for his family, of a kind which many young men wrote: ‘I would like to have lived. But, since God has willed otherwise, do not grieve too much, dear ones, for life in the other world must be beautiful, and I have lived a life with that in mind all along … I will have done my share to make the world a better place … Maybe when the lights go on again all over the world, free people can be happy and gay again … If I failed as a leader, and I pray God I didn’t, it was not because I did not try.’ It was only because many young men of many nations shared Waskow’s dogged commitment to do ‘the right thing’, as each belligerent society defined this, that the war could be carried on.

The principal victims of the campaign were the people of Italy. If Benito Mussolini had preserved Italian neutrality in 1940, it is possible that he might have maintained his dictatorship for many years in the same fashion as Gen. Franco of Spain, who presided over more mass murders than the Duce, yet was eventually welcomed into membership of NATO. It is unlikely that Hitler would have invaded Italy merely because Mussolini clung to non-belligerent status; the country had nothing Nazi Germany valued except views. As it was, however, between 1943 and 1945 the catastrophic consequences of adherence to the Axis were visited upon Italy. For many months even before Badoglio’s surrender, his fellow countrymen saw themselves not as belligerents, but instead as helpless victims of Hitler. Iris Origo wrote in her diary: ‘It is … necessary to … realise how widespread is the conviction among Italians that the war was a calamity imposed upon them by German forces – in no sense the will of the Italian people, and therefore something for which they cannot be held responsible.’ If this