The Germans were Never In the Abbey

The allies landed at Salerno, Italy, in September 1943, and Naples was captured in the first days of October.  After that the allies marched into the mountains south of Rome, which the Germans used effectively for defense to hold up the allied advance until the spring of 1944.  The most significant obstacle in the German Gustav Line centered around the town of Cassino, and the mountain that rose above it.  It was atop Monte Cassino, in 529 A.D. that St. Benedict of Nursia established a monastery, which became the source of the Benedictine Order.

With it's gleaming white walls, the two story Abbey drew the gaze of every soldier on the front line.  As the battle on the Gustav line devolved into a stalemate, the Abbey soon became the object of blame.  Surely, said the infantrymen below, the Germans had to be occupying the Abbey and using it as an observation post.  The Germans, with the advantage of commanding the heights, had almost unlimited viability and could call down artillery on any movement made by the allies.  But the Germans didn't need to be in the Abbey itself to have this commanding view, instead they needed only to occupy the ground outside of the monastery.

Even so, the Abbey became the fixation of every allied soldier.  A general claimed to have spotted the sun flashing off German binoculars on the second floor.  Even pilots flying over the Abbey claimed to see Germans inside it.  As every move to penetrate the Gustav line and make it into the Liri Valley -- with a straight shot to Rome -- was thwarted, some soldiers called for the destruction of the Abbey by air attack and artillery.  Other soldiers countered that bombing the Abbey would give no advantage, that, in fact, the Germans could make better defensive use of the ruins.  Though some of the first soldiers knew those other soldiers were right, the pressure mounted to bomb the Abbey.

And so, in February 1944, the allies bombed the Abbey, and the Germans moved into the ruins, and continued to thwart allied efforts to break the Gustav line.  Perhaps what is more remarkable is that the allies repeated the same mistake just a month later when they bombed the town of Cassino.  In the fight that followed, the New Zealand infantrymen faced such difficulty that they soon began to call the town "Little Stalingrad" after the monumental urban battle on the Russian front in 1942.  Eventually, the Kiwis admitted that they could not drive the Germans out of Cassino, and the stalemate continued.  The good news, if you can call it that, is that eventually spring would come, the allies would break the Gustav line, and race up the Liri Valley to capture Rome on June 5, 1944.

I recently read an excellent book on the campaigns in Italy, The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson, and I followed that by watching a movie called The Story of G.I. Joe.  The movie follows war correspondent Ernie Pyle, played by Burgess Meredith, who at times meets up with a company commanded by Bill Walker, played by Robert Mitchum, a character based on a real soldier who was killed during the battles on the Gustav Line.  In the film, the soldiers of Walker's company become fixated on the Abbey atop Monte Cassino and cheer when it is bombed, but then Pyle notes the irony of war in that the Germans made good use of the ruins.

As I have been thinking about Monte Cassino, I have thought about things I have at times become fixated on, that later turned out to not be as I had supposed they were.  In aerial combat there is something called target fixation; in chasing or bombing a target, the pilot becomes so fixated that he has tunnel vision, and sometimes the result is that he flies into the target.

It seems that we often have such fixations: if we could buy that house then all our problems would be solved; if we could ask a certain girl out, then life would be wonderful.

Often we become fixated on the weaknesses we see in others.  We want to remove the sliver in the eye of another and we become so fixated on it that we miss the telephone pole in our own eye.  At other times we become fixated on a perceived slight, and we cannot let go.  And sometimes we become fixated on having things done our way, and if they are not, we become disaffected.

Whatever our fixation, we should remind ourselves that the Germans were never in the Abbey.