Now with the 12th Polish Lancers of the newly formed II Polish Corps, Wladek moved with his regiment to Kirkuk. With plentiful rations and a moderately balanced diet, he and the rest of his Polish comrades gradually began to build up their strength. ‘We all felt anxious to get to the front,’ he says, ‘and begin fighting for the liberation of Poland. That may sound strange, but it’s true.’
After further training in Palestine, the 12th Lancers, part of the 3rd Carpathian Division, reached Italy in December 1943. Several months were spent carrying out final training and acclimatising, until, in the middle of April, they were moved up to the Cassino front.
In fact, General Sir Oliver Leese, commander of the British Eighth Army, under which II Polish Corps served, had visited General Anders on 24 March and proposed that his troops be given the task of taking the Monte Cassino heights and then the hill-top village of Piedimonte, several miles to the west in what would become the fourth battle of Cassino. ‘It was,’ noted Anders, ‘a great moment for me.’2
The Polish commander had suffered as well in the previous years of war. Captured by the Russians in September 1939, Anders had been imprisoned in Lubianka after refusing to join the Red Army. Released after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he was given permission to trace and recruit Polish POWs held in the gulags. It was largely thanks to his tireless efforts that he managed to muster some 160,000 men in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan who were then trained to continue the fight for Poland. Now, at Cassino, he had a small corps of two divisions and an armoured brigade made up of 45,626 fighting men. It was an incredible achievement by the dashing and charismatic fifty-two-year-old.
For a few moments only, Anders had considered Leese’s suggestion. He was well aware that Monte Cassino had not been taken in two months of bitter fighting; that it had hitherto eluded the efforts of battle-hardened and highly experienced troops. The task that Leese was putting forward was an awesome proposition for his men in what would be their first battle since the fall of Poland. ‘The stubbornness of the German defence at Cassino and on Monastery Hill was already a byword,’ Anders observed. ‘I realised that the cost in lives must be heavy, but I realised too the importance of the capture of Monte Cassino to the Allied cause, and most of all to that of Poland.’3 And so he accepted.
Now, on the evening of 11 May, the moment had almost arrived. Wladek and his comrades had been thoroughly briefed. The messages of Generals Alexander and Leese to their troops had been translated into Polish and the single sheets of thin paper passed around. So too had Anders’ own message. ‘Soldiers!’ he wrote, ‘The moment for battle has arrived. We have long awaited the moment for revenge and retribution over our hereditary enemy … The task assigned to us will cover with glory the name of the Polish soldier all over the world.’
Wladek and the men of 2nd Squadron, 12th Lancers were as one behind their commander. Certainly, Wladek was scared, but he was excited too. ‘We all wanted to be able to fight for our country,’ he says. ‘All of us, 100 per cent and 100 per cent more, felt a sense of honour at going into battle for Poland.’
It was not only the Poles who felt ready for the coming battle. Operation DIADEM, the codename for the battle for Rome, had been launched by the Commander-in-Chief of Allied Armies in Italy at a commanders’ conference on the last day of February 1944.* Since then, General Alexander, his staff, and commanders had been working flat out, reorganising and training troops, planning and making sure that nothing was left to chance; they were not going to be caught short for want of a horseshoe.
All of the commanders felt tense. For every single one involved, whether at divisional, corps or army level, this was to be the biggest battle of their careers: more men, more guns; more aircraft above them. Each was acutely aware of how much was at stake. Despite the build-up of men and materiel, and despite the improved weather, there was unlikely to be any easy victory. The flooding in the valley had receded but the Liri Valley, only six miles at its widest and just four at the greater part of its length, was narrow for a two-corps assault. The serpentine River Liri was too wide and deep to ford, while numerous other tributaries and water courses cut across the valley and hence the path of the attackers. There were also heavy German defences: concrete dugouts, gun turrets, machine-gun posts, mines and wire. Furthermore, overlooking this softly undulating valley of pasture, cornfields and broken woodland – slow going for wheels and tracks – were the imposing mountain ranges, filled with yet more carefully positioned guns, machine guns and troops. Indeed, the mouth of the Liri Valley, the gateway to Rome, was protected by two superb artillery positions, Monte Cassino to the north, and Monte Maio to the south. In four months of fighting these ‘gate posts’ had not been cleared. Few of the Allied commanders, however, could have felt this pressure more keenly than Lieutenant-General Mark W. Clark, Commander of the US Fifth Army.
The planning for Operation DIADEM largely complete, Clark spent a final few days touring the front, briefing his commanders and inspecting his troops, many of whom would be going into battle for the first time. Earlier that morning of Thursday, 11 May, Clark had inspected also the US 36th Division, pinning a number of medals on the chests of Texans and addressing them briefly. It was the 36th Division who had been involved in the first disastrous attempt to break into the Liri Valley back in January, when they had tried to cross the narrow Rapido River that runs south through the town. Even before that attack, the auspices had not been good. The British 46th Division had already failed to cross the wider River Garigliano further south – an operation designed to help the Texans in their task to cross the Rapido – and had warned the Americans that the ground on the far side of the river was heavily defended. Moreover, they had insufficient river craft with which to do the job. Yet Major-General Walker, 36th Division’s commander, had assured Clark, despite considerable private doubts, that the operation was still achievable. Clark, who had urgently needed to divert German troops away from the Anzio beachheads for the Allied landing that would take place two days later, had consequently given the go-ahead.
In the forty-eight hour operation that followed, some 1,700 men were killed or wounded. Rather like the men on the Somme on 1 July 1916, the Texans had been cut down in swathes. The river had run red with blood; the bodies stacked six high in places. In America, the pressmen had labelled the ‘Bloody Rapido’ the worst disaster since Pearl Harbor.
General Clark had taken his share of the blame, but within a few days it became apparent that the American-led operation at Anzio, Operation SHINGLE, had also fallen short of its aims. Neither the Rapido disaster nor the setback at Anzio had been entirely Clark’s fault and both operations had been executed because of pressure higher up the chain of command. But an army commander lives and dies by his successes, and by the spring of 1944 – on the battlefield at any rate – these had been all too few. Clark was unaware that his position was under threat and that discussions had taken place about whether to remove him, but he nonetheless keenly felt the frustrations of his comparative lack of success.
Mark Clark – or ‘Wayne’ as friends knew him – had just turned forty-eight at the start of May. Standing six foot three inches tall, he was lean and muscular, his hair still dark, and despite a prominently hawkish nose, he was a youthful-looking and handsome three-star general who towered over most of his subordinates and superiors alike. One of the few American commanders who had seen action in the last war, he had led a battalion in France in 1917, until wounded when a shell had exploded nearby. He spent the rest of the war as a captain carrying out staff duties. It was a rank he kept for sixteen years, sitting out the post-war doldrums with mounting impatience.
In 1933 his fortunes had finally begun to change, with promotion followed by time spent at both the US Command and General Staff College and the Army War College, so marking him out for future high command. By the summer of 1937 he had joined the 3rd Division, where he renewed his friendship with his old West Point friend, Dwight D. Eisenhower.