Monte Cassino Question

gents with the dug in literally positions it would not have mattered who was runing for the Allies the LW Paras would not have ceased to exist or retreat any sooner than what they needed.

did I mention I have at least 6 b/w photos of LW paras running around within the Abbey walls after it was bombed to pieces ? one must consider the prime observation points that now could be had amongst the terrible debris although the fact/myth has always been said the Paras never took residence within the abbey. Am wondering about this seriously.

 

I agree with you about the leadership attacking at cassino was suicide the terrain offered everything to the defender and nothing to the attacker and it wouldn,t of mattered who was in charge when they chose to attack there it was always going to go badly.

I think what gebirgsjagar meant was with better CO they may have taken a better option rather than the frontal assault.

I still like freyberg as a CO for the New Zealand division he did a lot of good things and we could have done far worse for a CO than him.

He really didn,t want to attack at cassino as i have explained in earlier posts but only took up the job when he was told if he said no they would send someone else,once we were committed to fighting at cassino we were doomed to a frontal assault a there was just no room to move there.

 

ah but what option could be taken except try and secure the bloody high ground with still large loss of life even to the point of trying to surround the Cassino Massif/and town. Ideally it would of been nice to get in behind and cut off any hope of removal of the LW Paras and continue farther up towards the Gothic line in rapid fashion.

 

The problem they faced trying to get into the Liri valley was hard to over come trying to cross the rapido.

I thought about the first battle where they trashed the U.S 34th Division trying to take the hill to the Monestry and threw away the U.S 36th trying to cross the rapido.

I go back to my first idea of attacking closer to the coast as far away from cassino as possible they could have used three British divisions that fought in the first battle the 5th,56th and the 46th attempting to cross the Garigliano and Gari rivers and instead of having the U.S 34th,36th divisions fighting at cassino and trying to cross the Rapido fight them in the same sector as the three british divisions and Bring in the Free French divisions as well to try and concentrate there forces for Maximum effect fighting behind concentrated artillery fire attempting to Breach the German line and get some armour onto highway 7.

With my idea i am trying to get around using forces piece meal which the allied commanders were guilty of instead concentrating the forces in one area to try and achieve maximum combat power and force a breach in the german line and get the armour threw the breach and onto highway 7 and push up the coast effectivly out flanking cassino.

I like the coastal attack because not only can the forces fight behind concentrated artillery fire and air power but you can also bring the navy in off the coast to lend support,the navel power was very effective against ground targets like at Anzio,salerno and Normandy.

 

Anzio was the ideal option but they never had the landing craft to make it work to the full effect they were all earmarked for Normandy so they were only able to land i think two divisions on the first day and they sat there for i think a week Lucas didn,t seem to have the confidence in the operation to move off the beachhead even when they built up 70,000 men there they still stayed where they were and the germans made them pay.

 

Thanks Steve, that is exactly what i meant! Sorry for my unclear statement.

Erich, i agree with Steve that it would have been better to concentrate the troops than to split them and sent them piece by piece to Cassino. With an combined Air/land assault from the beginning of the battle they had the much better chance to break through the german frontline.
The Anzio landing was also not wrong but it had to be more powerful and the troops had to break out of the beachhead and turning down in the direction of Cassino more. And from other battles you will know, fighting at two frontlines at the same time is impossible for a longer time. So what i want to say is that the two operations weren´t combined well with each other.

regards

Ulrich

 

agreed make a shore landing not so far to the south but north, bypass Cassino and let the German truppen rot in place, catch them from the backside later as they regroup and try and re-join their German units en-masse

 

Erich,

this is what i ment, better tactics.

Regards

Ulrich

 

I,m a bit confused on the North South direction in Italy did you mean an amphibious landing further towards Rome or closer to the german line at the rapido Liri valley entrance.

It was no doubt Anzio was a great idea i still think Lucas blew it i know some people try to stick up for him saying he didn,t land with enough forces there is some truth in that but at the end of the day he had two divisions and you just can,t sit on the beach when you come ashore you have to take the heights Gallipoli tells you that and i saw a documentry and the guy wasn,t told to go all the way to rome they wanted him to grab the Alban hills.

He could have left one division on the beachead to dig in and get the artillery registered along with mortars and machine guns etc and the other could have moved up to grab the heights because it is not like they didn,t have support they had massive naval and air support and again the ship guns and air power were devastating against grounds forces the german armour and grounds troops would have been sitting ducks and it should be remembered that after a week they had 70,000 allied men ashore which must amount to 4 divisions and they still didn,t move.

Lucas in my opinion should have sent one of his divisions up on the first day to grab the heights because if the worst come to the worst and he had to withdraw he would have been withdrawing onto a prepared defensive position with the Division he had left at the beach head and the withdrawl could have been covered by massive airpower and ship power it,s not like he had no support.

 

The expectation in the directive forwarded from Alexander to Clark & hence to Lucas was the 6th Corps would drive NE to Rome after the complete corps was ashore. That was Churchill's original idea/expectation & it was wrapped up in Alexanders instructions to Clark. Technically Lucas was not 'ordered' to take off straight to Rome, but it was expected the 6th Corps would take Rome in a few weeks.

You need to look at a map and check the scale. The "heights" you refer to were too large a area for a single infantry division to cover effectively. particualry against the corps size group the Germans had approaching from the south and east within 24 hours. Second the bulk of the Alban Hills are out of range of any US or British divisional artillery back at the beach head. A few heavy corps artillery battalions could in theory reach that far, but that implies landing those & their ammunition before tank and infantry battalions or their divisional artillery.

The other part of this distance factor is one division cant cover the or defend the distance between the beach and the Alban hills. Five Allied divisions covered a 25 mile perimeter at the end of the first week & that still did not come close to including the Alban hills. Trying to cover those and the beachead with two infantry divisions would scatter the battalions so thinly German reconissace groups could have passed through them.

Note that Patton paid a visit to Lucas a couple weeks before the Anzio landing. After looking over the directive & related plans Lucas had been handed he pronounced it a "suicide mission" and predicted the operation would be defeated very quickly.

 

There were no less than 4 battles for Monte Cassino.....each had a different mix of troops....the New Zealanders were prominent in the THIRD battle, (2nd NZ division, including the famous 28th Maoris). They were supported by Indians, (6th Rajputs, 5 Indian Brigade, 4th Indian division), and 9th Gurkhas of the same division. Brit units for this battle were the Buffs, Kents, and Essex soldiers of 36 Brigade.. The Kiwis fielded Sherman tanks and engineers. The sole American unit represented at IIIrd Cassino was the 760th, a unit of Stuart light tanks.

The Poles were not fed into the battle until the fourth push, and they occupied a position that had been devastated. The Fallschirmjeager make no claims to occupation of the Abbey BEFORE the bombing, but have no qualms about admitting to moving in there AFTER....it was just a heap of rubble by that stage anyway, and perfectly suited to defense.

 

History shows that when you do an amphibious landings you have to get off the beach as quick as you can or you invite disaster.

From the information you have given it is obvious lucas wasn,t given what he needed to get the job done i stand corrected.

 

I still think it was a big screwup by the allies. I believe that the Abbey was unoccupied by the Germans. I believe that the Germans were too smart to concentrate their forces in a packaged target. If the allies were concerned about the German artillery harassing them where were the air forces. The Allies had control of the air and could have simply picked off artillery positions at will. The reason why it took the Allies so long to attack the Abbey seemed like they had nothing else to do. Sometime I question the quality of senior allied officers running the campaign.

 

I View attachment 15604

 

That is correct. In fact, earlier the Herman Goring Division helped the monks remove a bunch of books and art treasures to the Vatican for safe keeping. (However Herman Georing took a few treasures for his own personal collection as a "thank you".) A good read on this is, "Monte Cassino" by Hapgood and Richardson.

 

It is also my understanding that there were no Germans in the abbey prior to the bombing (though they were not far away). In addition, I too have been to Monte Cassino (in 2003) and agree that there were plenty of other observation points the Germans could have used outside the Abbey walls.

 

http://www.ww2f.com/information-requests/20141-battle-monte-cassino-reseacrh-questions.html

See post #12

Also:
http://www.ww2f.com/western-europe/52520-abbey-monte-casino-2.html

posting #71

From one who was there

Ron

 

I have been reading Rupert Clarke's book With Alex at War and his recollections are interesting on the subject of whether there were any Germans in the Monastery before 15 Feb 44.
Rupert Clarke, who was ADC to Gen Alexander mentions the controversy of whether Germans were in the Monastery or not in his book ‘With Alex at War’ He records that:

...later learnt from Colonel David Hunt (later Sir David and Private Secretary to the Prime Minister) who was our GSO 1 Intelligence, that the Monastery was indeed not occupied by German parachutists who were holding the Cassino feature.

A radio intercept of the German command net reported that a parachutist commander had been heard to ask:

Ist Abt in Kloster?

and was answered:

Ja in Kloster mit Monchen.

The Intelligence Officer who received the intercept only recorded the answer ‘yes’.

The translation then produced was:

Is the HQ in the Abbey?

The word Abt being taken as an abbreviation for Abteil – a battalion or unit rather than Abbott.

It was only when Colonel Hunt questioned the translation, and the whole intercept, that it transpired that the correct reply to the question was:

Ja, Abt ist mit Mochen in Klosters – Yes, the Abbott is with the monks in the Abbey.

Tragically, this discovery was made too late.

Regards

FdeP

 

The German commander permitted troops to attend church services in the Abbey.
This information was repeatedly conveyed to the Allied forces.

See also http://www.ww2f.com/western-europe/52520-abbey-monte-casino.html

 

I think the problem with Cassino was poor quality of leadership and command exercised by Alexander and Clark.

Clark was a flawed commander. He wasn't particularly good at the battle fighting part of being a general. While personally brave and quite charismatic, he did not have what the Germans call "fingertip feel" for what was happening. His operations were ordered from the map and, as well documented, driven by considerations of PR rather than military success. His decision to order VI corps to attack towards Rome rather than try to cut off the German 10th Army is best known. However, his obsession with the idea of being the American General who captures Rome with American soldiers also led him to insist on a plan for the Jan - Feb Battles which had the same script - the 1st US Armoured division exploiting up the Liri Valley.

On several occasions the Allies had the Germans on the Ropes in January, but the attacking Corps did not have the troops to break through. Juin and McCreery both ran out of men in their attacks in January and their attacks were not co-ordinated, which gave the Germans time to shuffle their reserves to the critical sector. Clark did not seem to get this. The Gustav Line could not be cracked by an attack by a single Corps or a series of Corps attacks one after the other. Alexander, who should have known better and was a fighting General was happy to leave Clark to get on with it. (Though it may be that the fact that Clark was an American made his decisions untouchable, given American sensitivities. Look at the fuss that was made about reallocating a single road in Sicily for 48 hours.)

The Gustav line was not breached until May, after Harding had been appointed as Alexanders COS and developed Op Diadem. Diadem brought the allied strength from both 5th and 8th Armies to bear at the same time on same sector of the Gustav line. Even though the allies had massive superiority in material and manpower it took a week to break down the German defences. Diadem was not a walkover. Although the attacks start on 11th May the initial progress is very slow. The initial attacks by the French II US and XIII British Corps were little more effective than the attacks in January or Feburary. But , this time the Allies have enough fresh troops to keep up the pressure until the Germans break.

One other problem hampered allied plans was the obsession with plans which made the best use of the British and US armies armoured and motorised troops, seen as the key to mobility in WW2. However in Italy motorisation hampered rather than helped mobility. There are too few places where a motorised army could deploy and fight effectively. Too many mountain ridges separated by rivers and too few roads and areas of good cross country going. Even the Liri valley had too many olive groves, terraced vineyards stone walls,etc. All too often a motorised advance would be on a frontage of a single vehicle. Juin and Tuker, the mountain warfare men saw that the key to mobility was in light infantry where a formation organised and equipped for mountain warfare could manouvre. The French exploited their breakthrough over the mountains SW of the Liri Valley. Tuker and Juin's suggestion to bypass Cassino by attacking over the mountains NE of Cassino to Atina was probably sound, but not readily comprehended by planners looking for places to deploy armoured divisions. Arguably the Allies might have been better served with far fewer vehicles and a lot more mules.