Who won the Battle of Monte Cassino?
The Allies won, after four battles fought between 17 January and 18 May 1944 for the German-held mountain and abbey that blocked the road to Rome. American, British, French, North African, New Zealand, Indian and Polish troops all attacked it. In the fourth battle the Polish II Corps under General Władysław Anders stormed the heights, and on 18 May 1944 its soldiers raised their flag over the ruins of the abbey.2
At noon on 18 May 1944 a Polish bugler climbed onto the rubble of one of the most famous monasteries in Europe and played the Hejnał Mariacki, the trumpet call of Kraków, more than a thousand kilometers from home. For four months the Allied advance on Rome had been blocked by a single mountain crowned by that abbey: Monte Cassino. Three great assaults had broken on it. The fourth, which the Polish II Corps paid for with nearly a thousand dead, finally carried the heights.3
The gateway to Rome
After the Allies landed in Italy in 1943, their advance up the peninsula ground to a halt in the winter of 1943 to 1944 against the Gustav Line, the main German defense line, which ran about 100 miles from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic along the Garigliano, Rapido and Sangro rivers. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring held it with some 15 divisions, dug into minefields, bunkers and concealed gun positions.4
Its linchpin was Monte Cassino, a hill rising about 1,700 feet above sea level over the town of Cassino, crowned by the Benedictine monastery where the bones of the order's founder, Saint Benedict, lay. The hill overlooked the Liri valley and the main highway to Rome. Whoever held it could watch every movement on the valley floor below.5
The first battle
The first battle opened on 17 January 1944 and lasted until 11 February. The British 10 Corps attacked across the Garigliano and lost 4,152 men in the last two weeks of January alone. The US 36th Division tried to cross the Rapido and was shattered in the attempt. North of the town the US 34th Division and the French Expeditionary Corps, with its Algerian and Moroccan troops, fought their way into the mountains, and on 4 February an American battalion came within a few hundred yards of the abbey. It could go no farther. By mid-February the 36th Division's infantry regiments were down to less than a quarter of their fighting strength.6
In the same weeks the Allies landed behind the German line at Anzio, south of Rome, hoping to unlock the front. The landing failed to break the deadlock, and Anzio became a hard-pressed beachhead of its own.7 › Battle of Anzio, 1944
The bombing of the abbey
The second battle fell to the New Zealand Corps of General Bernard Freyberg, with the 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian Divisions. The commander of the Indian division, Major General Francis Tuker, regarded the abbey as an obstacle that had to be destroyed, and Freyberg pressed for an air attack, calling it an essential target. The US Fifth Army commander, General Mark Clark, did not think it a military necessity, but he deferred to Freyberg, and General Harold Alexander approved the bombing.8
The Germans had in fact formally declared that they would not use the building and had taken its art treasures and most of its monks to safety (the abbot and a handful of monks stayed behind), though their positions ran right below its walls. On the morning of 15 February 1944 about 250 bombers dropped almost 600 tons of bombs on the abbey and reduced most of it to rubble. Some 115 refugees sheltering inside were killed, while the German troops on the slopes below were unharmed. German paratroopers then moved into the ruins, which made a far better fortress than the abbey had. The attacks that followed failed, and the New Zealanders who took Cassino's railway station on 17 February lost it the next day.9
Clark later called the battle for Cassino the most grueling, the most harrowing, and in one aspect the most tragic, of any phase of the war in Italy. Years afterward the destruction of the abbey fed into a UNESCO protocol forbidding armies to use the immediate surroundings of historic, cultural and religious monuments.10
The third battle
The third battle opened on 15 March 1944 with an even heavier bombardment, this time of the town. In three and a half hours some 435 aircraft dropped almost 1,000 tons of bombs, though only about 300 tons fell on Cassino itself, and 746 guns fired behind them. Then the New Zealanders went in. The defenders were the German 1st Parachute Division, which had moved into Cassino at the end of February, and the rubble suited them perfectly. Fighting from cellar to cellar, the paratroopers held, and German commander Heinrich von Vietinghoff later wrote that no other troops could have held Cassino. On 23 March Alexander called the attack off. The New Zealand and Indian troops had lost about 2,000 men in nine days.11
Anders' army
In late March the British Eighth Army commander, General Oliver Leese, gave the hardest task of the next offensive to General Władysław Anders: the capture of the Monte Cassino heights. Anders' men had come a very long way. Captured by the Soviets in 1939, Anders spent nearly two years in Soviet prisons before the Polish-Soviet agreement of August 1941 allowed him to raise an army from former prisoners and deportees. Under Polish and British pressure, Stalin let him lead it out of the Soviet Union to Iran and Iraq in 1942.12
By the spring of 1944 the corps numbered about 50,000 men and formed an independent part of the Eighth Army. Its main units were the 3rd Carpathian Rifle Division under Brigadier General Bronisław Duch, the 5th Kresowa Infantry Division under Brigadier General Nikodem Sulik and the 2nd Armored Brigade under Brigadier General Bronisław Rakowski. Facing them were the German 1st Parachute and 5th Mountain Divisions.13 › Siege of Tobruk, 1941
On 11 May Anders issued an order of the day that every soldier in the corps would remember. The task that had fallen to them, he wrote, would make the name of the Polish soldier famous throughout the world.14
Phantom Ridge and Hill 593
The fourth battle, the great Allied offensive known as Operation Diadem, opened at 11 p.m. on 11 May 1944 with a barrage from some 1,600 guns along the whole front. Two hours later the Polish infantry went forward. The Kresowa Division attacked the Phantom Ridge (Widmo), and the Carpathian Division attacked Hill 593 and the Massa Albaneta farm, on open, rocky slopes swept by German machine guns. By the end of 12 May the attack had failed, and the Kresowa infantry, bled white, had fallen back from the ridge.15
On 17 May the Poles attacked again. By seven in the morning the Kresowa Division had taken Phantom Ridge and held it, and it went on to take the smaller of the two San Angelo heights. Commandos, part of the 15th Lancers and two improvised battalions were thrown into the fight. The attacks on Hill 593 were still being thrown back. That day the Poles intercepted a German order to withdraw from the monastery.16
18 May 1944
In the night of 17 to 18 May the 1st Parachute Division slipped away on Kesselring's orders, to avoid being cut off. In the morning the Carpathian Division finally took Hill 593, and a patrol of the 12th Podolian Lancers under Second Lieutenant Kazimierz Gurbiel climbed into the ruins of the abbey. They found it empty except for a handful of wounded Germans who could not be moved. At around ten in the morning, 9:50 by one account and 10:20 by another, the patrol hung up a hastily made regimental pennant. The white and red flag of Poland followed, and beside it the British flag.17
At noon Master Corporal Emil Czech played the Kraków trumpet call from the ruins. The Allied commander in Italy, General Alexander, told the Poles that it had been a day of great glory for Poland when they conquered the fortress. The Gustav Line was now broken. Within a week the Allies also broke through the next German position, the Hitler Line, where the Poles took Piedimonte on 25 May, and on 4 June 1944 American troops entered Rome.18
The cost
The Polish II Corps lost 923 men killed, 2,931 wounded and 345 missing in the fighting for Monte Cassino. Across all four battles the losses were far greater. The IPN puts Allied losses at about 55,000 men, and Britannica, which counts the whole campaign, at 105,000 Allied and 80,000 German casualties. The town of Cassino and its abbey were destroyed.19
For the Poles the victory was bitter. They had fought under the slogan For Your Freedom and Ours, yet their country was passing under Soviet control. Anders stayed in exile in Britain, and in 1946 Poland's new communist government stripped him of his citizenship. At home the authorities suppressed the memory of the battle for years.20 › For Your Freedom and Ours
Poppies and memory
In the night of 17 to 18 May, a few hours before the abbey fell, Feliks Konarski, a soldier and prewar songwriter, wrote the first verses of Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino (The Red Poppies on Monte Cassino) at a military base near the front, and Alfred Schütz set them to music. First sung at Campobasso, the song spread through the corps and became one of the best-known Polish songs of the war, taking its title from the poppies that bloomed on the shell-torn hills.21
The Polish war cemetery was built on the hillside between the monastery and Hill 593 in 1944 and 1945, to a design by the architects Wacław Hryniewicz and Jerzy Skolimowski, and consecrated on 1 September 1945, the sixth anniversary of the outbreak of the war. It holds 1,072 soldiers of the II Corps. Anders, who died in London on 12 May 1970, was buried among them, and his wife Irena lies beside him. Its inscription asks the passer-by to tell Poland that they fell faithful in her service.22
Every year on 18 May Polish veterans, soldiers and officials gather at the cemetery, which the Polish Ministry of Culture has cared for since 2016. A large white monument to the battle also stands in Warsaw. For the Polish view of the whole war, see our guide to the greatest battles in Polish history and the World War II era page.23 › Wojtek the Soldier Bear
