Amongst them was twenty-three-year-old company commander Lieutenant Joseph ‘Jupp’ Klein, a battle-hardened veteran of the Eastern Front, Sicily and the second and third battles of Cassino. His company’s recent leave had been the first since arriving in Italy the previous August following the Sicily campaign and had done much to revive their spirits, but after a day back at the front they still had much to do. There were more machine-gun positions to be built, more tunnels to dig and retreat routes to be prepared.
On the night of 11 May, at eleven o’clock, Jupp Klein was standing on the debris-strewn Via Casilina, talking to one of his corporals, when ‘suddenly from heaven to hell the night became as bright as day’.9 As the shells screamed overhead, Jupp immediately recognised that the sheer scale of the barrage could only mean one thing: the offensive had started – and sooner than any of them had expected.
A few miles north in a concrete bunker along a narrow valley between the mountains above Cassino, Major Georg Zellner, commander of the 3rd Battalion Hoch-und-Deutschmeister Reichs Grenadier Regiment, gathered around him a few of his officers. Throughout the day he had been receiving the best wishes of his men on this his thirty-ninth birthday. Some of his staff had even brought him some flowers picked from the mountain. The major, however, was not in good spirits. Desperately homesick, he hoped for a letter or card from his wife and two young daughters back home in Passau in south-east Germany, but nothing had yet arrived. All day, he’d waited, praying there would be some word from them on the evening’s ration cart but nothing came.
Two bottles of sekt – sparkling wine – had arrived for him and he and a few of his officers were about to share them. Having eased the cork from the first of the bottles, Georg was about to take a birthday gulp when the world seemed to be ripped apart as the massed Allied guns roared the opening salvo of the battle. ‘We drink the sekt anyway,’ he noted drily.10
Watching the barrage from the safety of Monte Trocchio, behind the Allied lines, was twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Ted Wyke-Smith, a former steel engineer from Sheffield now serving with 78th Division Royal Engineers. As commander of a bridging unit, his job was to be amongst the division’s spearhead as it advanced, once the 4th and 8th Indian Divisions had made the initial breakthrough, and build Bailey bridges over the numerous rivers and anti-tank ditches that barred the Allied progress. Ted had been sitting in his tented dugout listening to nightingales in the trees nearby when the guns opened fire. ‘It was terrific,’ he remembers. ‘The noise was incredible and even where we were, several miles behind the lines, the ground trembled.’ Curiously, however, the nightingales began singing again shortly after. ‘It was most extraordinary,’ says Ted, ‘a concerto of nightingales and cannons.’
The first infantry to attack were the unblooded Americans of the 85th Infantry Division, who set off from their start positions the moment the barrage began. None of the French and American troops of Fifth Army had any rivers to cross, but they faced formidable obstacles nonetheless. The 1st and 3rd Battalions of the 338th Infantry Regiment had been ordered to assault a 400-foot high ridge studded with knolls, known as Spigno Saturnia. Terraced and dotted with farmhouses and occasional olive groves, the forward slopes were well defended by the infantry regiments of the German 94th Division.
Company D of the 1st Battalion had been given ‘Point 131’ as their first objective – the most imposing and best-defended height along the ridge. Lieutenant Bob Wiggans had been impressed by the scale of their barrage and had begun the advance through the wheat fields and olive groves with a certain amount of confidence. As the barrage lifted, however, he realised to his horror that the Germans, hidden in their well-constructed concrete bunkers, were almost completely unharmed.
‘We moved forward and immediately drew all kinds of fire,’ he noted, ‘machine gun, automatic weapon, rifle, mortar, and artillery. So many men were killed.’11 Although the Custermen had briefly gained the crest, they became pinned down and with reinforcements unable to reach them, they were forced to fall back halfway down the slopes. As Bob paused, he glanced at a ditch next to him where five men of his company were already lying dead. For two years they’d been training for this moment, yet for so many of them it had all been over in a trice.
It was not only the 1st Battalion that were being stopped in their tracks. Elsewhere along the southernmost part of the front, other American units were coming up against a wall of enemy fire and finding it almost impossible to make any headway. On their right, the French were also struggling. The Goumiers managed to take the heights of Monte Faito, but other objectives could not be taken as the colonial troops had been confronted with German flamethrowers as well as heavy mortar and machine-gun fire.
Meanwhile, in the Liri Valley, barely anything had gone right for the Allies. After the warm day and suddenly cool night, river mists had developed along the River Garigliano and then mingled with the intense smoke caused by the biggest barrage of the war. Despite weeks of endlessly practising river crossings, no one had considered the effect the smoke from the guns would have on visibility. Nor had the planners appreciated just how strong the current would be in the ‘Gari’. Many of those crossing in assault boats were swept away, while others were destroyed by machine-gun fire and mortars. Meanwhile the sappers who had been due to lay six Bailey bridges under the light of the moon had found the fog as thick as the worst kind of London pea-souper. Their task had been almost impossible. Only by a miracle and enormous ingenuity was the first successfully built by 9 a.m. on the 12th. Another was open for business an hour later, but attempts to build the others failed amidst enemy fire and appalling fog.
The Poles had not fared much better. They had not launched their assault until 1 a. m., two hours after the barrage had opened up and some time after the 8th Indian and 4th Divisions had attacked in the valley below. As a result, the German paratroopers were already alert to the possibility of an attack. To make matters worse for the Poles, the 3rd Fallschirmjäger Regiment, whose positions they were attacking, were in the process of relieving a number of their troops, so in the cross-over there were many more enemy forces opposing them than there might have been. This extra German fire power proved decisive. Although the Poles reached their first objectives, they were soon pinned down, and, like the Americans, struggled to get reinforcements and further supplies forward. By evening the following day, they had suffered 1,800 casualties – nearly a quarter of their attacking strength – and had been driven back to their starting positions.
Wladek Rubnikowicz and the 12th Lancers, in their positions below the rubble of the monastery, had been given the task of sending out reconnaissance parties across no-man’s-land, while the main force attacked the high ground to the north of the monastery. It was the first time they had ventured from their positions and although not part of the main attack, they had still come under heavy enemy machine-gun and mortar fire. It was merely a taste of what was to come.
News of the unfolding battle was patchy. Visibility, through the thick blanket of mist and cordite smoke that smothered the valley, was no more than ten yards and only snippets of information trickled in to HQ. Despite the paucity of news, the Signals Office was a hub of activity, with exchanges and calls coming through constantly. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders had been cut to pieces at the Liri Appendix, but the division as a whole had captured a small but critical bridgehead. RAF Spitfires were soon patrolling overhead; then USAF bombers came over to paste the German positions. Reinforcements arrived for the Appendix, but the enemy mortaring did not let up.
At his Tactical Headquarters near Venafro, less than ten miles west of Cassino, General Leese appeared to be as unaware of the situation as most of the attacking troops, noting ‘there is a vast smokescreen like a yellow London fog over the battlefield’. Yet the Germans couldn’t see very clearly either. As General Alexander had intended,