The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [220]
Clark made a key error in not moving straight on to the nearby Gustav Line as soon as the Winter Line was broken in mid-December 1944. Instead the Fifth Army only reached the Sangro, Rapido and Garigliano rivers and the Gustav Line between 5 and 15 January 1944. The Germans were thus given almost another month to prepare the (already formidable) defences of the Gustav Line after the fall of Mounts Camino and Lungo and the medieval town of San Pietro Infine. These had been formidable obstacles, and the scars of the house-by-house fighting in San Pietro, in three separate assaults by the 36th Texas National Guard Division against the 15th Panzergrenadiers, can still be seen today, in the town which has been kept just as it was in 1944. ‘The name of San Pietro will be remembered in military history,’ reads the Operations Report of the 143rd Infantry Regiment of the 36th Division, which finally took the town from the rear on 18 December 1943 after two previous attacks had been flung back.
We picked our way through fields ripped by mortars and shells and the still bodies of doughboys [GIs] who fell in the bloody, savage fighting… [in] this gray little town overlooking the valley approaches to Cassino. The soldiers call it Death Valley because death was on the rampage… as they stormed this enemy fortress ringed by fortifications, dug into terraced slopes commanding the Liri valley.
The German garrison of San Pietro could not merely be bypassed, isolated and hemmed in, as the Fifth Army moved on towards the Gustav Line, because their observation posts in the town would have directed incessant and accurate artillery fire on to the advancing forces and their logistical support. Just as with Camino, Lungo and the great monastery hill of Monte Cassino itself, there was no alternative to holding the high ground.
Between the attack on Camino on 6 December and the Germans finally being expelled from San Pietro on the 18th, the fierce fighting left the Fifth Army spent, and the driving sleet and hail further blunted enthusiasm for an assault on the Gustav Line during the shortest days of the year. The snow and low clouds also meant that little air support could be expected in the period before planes could land by instrumentation alone. The hiatus before the renewed Allied offensive therefore allowed Senger a vital month in which to dig in, bring up reinforcements from Rome, reposition his forces and make his contingency plans. The (anti-Nazi) Senger had commanded the withdrawal of German troops from Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, and was a master of the rearguard action. The Winter Line was only ever an outpost, a delaying position in front of the Gustav Line, just as the Hitler Line was yet another one behind it.
Since it was deemed impossible for troops untrained in mountain warfare to operate to the east of the 5,000-foot Mount Cairo, where there was a continuous range of peaks right across the centre of the peninsula, the attack on Cassino had to take place from the west and south of the town. Then, as now, the town formed a horseshoe around the 1,700-foot-high hill on the peak of which the abbey rests. Founded in the early sixth century by St Benedict himself, it was the mother church of the Benedictine Order. Cassino was the strongest part of the Gustav Line, nestling under Mount Cairo. ‘There was something titanic about the scene,’ wrote Harris, ‘frightening in its vastness, sombre under the low cloud and drizzling rain that blurred outlines and gave the slopes a menacing appearance of evil.’24 By the time the Allies reached