A rchive Date
[ 07-06-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ France ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Calgary/Bill_Kaufmann/2004/06/07/488885.html
Bloody battle
Place of peace was scene of barbarous slaughter
By Bill Kaufmann - Calgary Sun
Mon, June 7, 2004
The majestic Benedictine abbey was built in the sixth century by a Catholic order dedicated to civilizing Medieval Europe. At the heart of that philosophy was a Humane Rule of Order. Fourteen centuries later, that place of peace came to symbolize barbarous slaughter and the folly of war.
While the world rightly marks the epic Normandy landings' 60th anniversary, little thought has been spared to the six decades since the fall of Italy's Monte Cassino.
From January to May, 1944, the mountains and valleys dominated by the monastery became a charnel house exceeded only by the bloodbaths on the Eastern Front - Stalingrad, Cherkassy, Bagration, the Narva, Sevastopol ... . Sturdy soldiers were reduced to babbling madmen in Cassino's howling hurricanes of artillery fire and in the suicidal assaults pushed forward by the flamethrower's rage.
Calgarian Marian Baranowski was a 23-year-old signaller with the Polish Corp, thrown into a shell-blasted Dante's inferno with a single mission: Seize the abbey and unlock the door to Rome. "We lost 75% of our unit in the first attack ... it was like hell," he says. "I wouldn't wish any of it on anyone."
Three previous, drawn-out assaults had collapsed in the withering fire poured down mountain slopes by elite German paratroopers aptly nicknamed the green devils. The Allies had brought much of the misery on themselves.
Wrongly suspecting the Germans were using the monastery as an observation post, the religious treasure was reduced to rubble by 200 U.S. bombers. Hundreds of civilians who had taken shelter in the abbey ignored German advice they leave, and died in the air strike. The ruins provided the paratroopers with ideal cover and the attackers paid heavily.
"They had bunkers dug in it and bombs wouldn't hurt them," recalls Baranowski. Savagely-contested were craggy rises suitably dubbed Hangman's and Calvary Hills. Adding to the blood-soaked insanity, says Baranowski, were the bombs dropped on his comrades by U.S. or British planes - maiming and killing many.
Through a memory clouded by strokes, the date of the final assault's launch, May 11, stands out in Baranowski's memory. A maelstrom of hot shell splinters and lead, punctuated by the shrieks of the dying, lasted a full week. "The firing went on from May 11 until May 18 - it never stopped once," he says.
The frontal assaults were reminiscent of the First World War's trench butchery, with officers ordering their men into a predictable abattoir, regardless of how dubious the objective. "Why we were fighting? In my opinion - it wasn't necessary, but it was all about the higher-ups," says Baranowski. "But we'd done what we were supposed to do."
At age 26, Walter Niewinski commanded a Polish Sherman tank creeping its way up the rocky slope of Monastery Hill. "Our tank was hit, 150 metres from the top and it started burning, so I jumped out and landed on the rocks," says Niewinski, adding other crew members were cremated. After three days in a medical station, Niewinski was thrown back into the fray by a Polish Corp short of tank commanders.
When the Poles finally reached the smouldering, pulverized abbey, most surviving defenders had fled, leaving mounds of dead and a few pitiful, half-insane wounded behind. "They were tired and very afraid we'd kill them, after what Germans had done to Poland," recalls Calgarian Niewinski.
Mingled with the elation and relief of hoisting the Polish flag over the Monastery was the horror of the desolate scene they'd conquered, strewn with entrails and headless torsos. "Nobody had had a chance to clean up the bodies ... you could pick up the shrapnel off the ground, it was so thick," says Baranowski, who went on to fight elsewhere in Italy.
"I don't think there could be a worse battle than Cassino." Breaking the stalemate along Hitler's Gustav line, confirmed as a sideshow by the D-Day landings the next month, cost a staggering 300,000 casualties on all sides.
Today, the pastoral tranquility of cemeteries stretching into the distance at Cassino can't soften the crushing sense of waste, of squandered youth. Gallantry and courage, abundant at Cassino among the soldiers of 30 nations who fought there, was spent dearly.
Wrote U.S. theologian Henry Emerson Fosdick: "The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst."
Six decades on, that could be Monte Cassino's epitaph.
Email: bill.kaufmann@calgarysun.com Letters to the editor should be sent to: callet@calgarysun.com Home Page
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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