The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [224]
‘What exceeded all expectations was the fighting spirit of the troops,’ Senger later wrote of his 1st Parachute Rifle Division, which had relieved the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division on 15 March and was engaged against the New Zealanders in the town. ‘The soldiers crawled out of the shuttered cellars and bunkers to confront the enemy with the toughest resistance. Words can hardly do them justice. We had all reckoned that those who survived the hours of bombing and the casualties would be physically and morally shaken, but this was not so.’ He put this down to their being trained, as paratroopers, in fighting in isolated, surrounded areas of resistance. Senger particularly liked the way they didn’t bother to report the loss of small amounts of ground ‘because they hoped soon to recover it’.36 Visiting 3rd Paratroop Regiment at the divisional headquarters of General Richard Heidrich, the commander of I Parachute Corps, Senger recalled the ‘jarring explosion of shells, the whistling of splinters, the smell of freshly thrown-up earth, and the well-known mixture of smells from glowing iron and burnt powder’, which vividly reminded him of his time on the Somme. ‘Hitler was right when he told me that here was the only battlefield of this war that resembled those of the First,’ he wrote after the war. In fact there were plenty such battlefields, especially in Russia, but Führers are not on oath when awarding oak-leaf clusters to brave commanders.
The gradient of the Monastery Hill slope up to the abbey is 500 yards up for every thousand horizontal, that is 45 degrees, and the other places where the fighting was fiercest in the town – the Continental Hotel (which had a German tank concealed inside its foyer), Castle Hill, the botanical gardens and the railway station – sound like sites in a Baedeker guide, but they all saw vicious hand-to-hand combat. The fighting in the town of Cassino, recalled a veteran, ‘was at such close quarters that one floor of a building might be held by a defender while the next was occupied by the attackers. If the latter wished to use their artillery to soften up the building before storming it, they would have to evacuate this floor!’37
‘The Cassino front cost the Allies three whole months for an advance of 15 kilometres,’ boasted a proud Senger years afterwards. By early 1944 the Germans had twenty-three divisions in Italy, fifteen of which formed the Tenth Army holding the Gustav Line against Alexander’s by now eighteen divisions. If the Allies were able to make amphibious hops up the coast of Italy, ‘like a harvest bug’ in Churchill’s typically arresting simile, they needed to get behind the Germans’ east–west defensive lines. This was the thinking behind the attack on Anzio, Operation Shingle, although the need for landing craft – principally Landing Ships Tank (LSTs) – for the operation meant that the timing for the Normandy landings (codenamed Overlord) had to be postponed a month from the date of 1 May 1944 that had been agreed at the Trident Conference in Washington.
The amphibious attacks on Anzio and Nettuno, small holiday ports on the west coast of Italy 30 miles south of Rome, by the