Feature
Back to Cassino
by Selwyn Manning
For the men who returned to the site of one of New Zealand's bloodiest battles, the strongest memories were of their comrades who never came home.
Age has wearied them, these men who have returned to commemorate the Battle of Monte Cassino. Now in their eighties, they are back in Italy to pay their respects to friends and acquaintances who were buried here during what is now recognised as one of New Zealand’s most tragic battles.
They have come from all over New Zealand to this place, where they once shared an experience no human being ought to witness. Their bodies may be weighed down by the years now, but for most their recall of what happened at Cassino in May 1944 remains acute. Memories of days they spent 60 years ago in these fields, streets and ditches, in one of Italy’s most beautiful regions, are flooding back.
Cassino then was hell on earth. That’s what all the veterans say. They speak of the mud, rain, cold and blood. They speak of the dead, as do the gravestones at the Cassino War Cemetery.
But today, as 125 veterans file in for the New Zealand commemorative service, the sun warms. Spring onions are ready to harvest. Blood-coloured poppies grow wild in the fields. The nearby mountain ranges are still capped with snow.
This is a day to recall how our young men fought and died in terrible numbers. It is a day to listen to what remains in the minds of the survivors.
The village of Cassino sits in a narrow valley framed by mountains reminiscent of Wellington’s Rimutaka ranges. In this respect, Cassino seems familiar – an Italian version of Featherston, dominated by the surrounding terrain, a gateway to an open expanse of land to the north.
Julian Wagg, the principal chaplain for New Zealand Defence, opens the service with a sombre prayer about sacrifice and freedom. Our old soldiers silently bow their heads. So do the half-dozen Germans and 20-odd Italians in attendance. Over the next hour or so, speeches and waiata, a reading and another prayer revisit the same themes.
This is a quiet place of rich green lawn, evergreen hedges and limestone monuments. All are cared for by the locals.
New Zealand is celebrated in these parts. Michele Di Lonardo, a tourism guide and businessman here, says: “Your community has given so much.”
The gravestones are decorated with wildflowers – hues of yellow, blue, pink, violet, subtle shades of white. The effect is that of an impressionist masterpiece, but the beauty is strangely tinged with a nagging sense of loss at the thought of the numbers who lie buried here.
They were young men, mostly, men like Neil Pollock of the Royal New Zealand Infantry, who was 22 on March 17 1944, when he died during the height of that terrible battle. He came so close to making it. One week later, Lieutenant General Freyberg halted the New Zealand attack.
A friend of Neil Pollock’s back in New Zealand remembers him as a gentle young man who “ought not to have been made to fight. It was just not in his making.”
In five months from January to May, 1944, the Allied troops were bogged down in a street-by-street battle. It was a slaughter. Almost 20,000 people died, 464 of them New Zealanders. Almost 1000 Kiwis were injured.
The soldiers lived -– and died – under the baleful gaze of Germans in the abbey above, watching their every move. Bryan O’Connor from the 6th Field Regiment looks up at Monte Cassino, at the rebuilt Benedictine abbey on the hilltop, and shows the horror is still keenly felt: “Bugger that thing,” he says.
The abbey at Monte Cassino was a fortress that Allied generals insisted on conquering. But, on top of the forbidding vertical cliffs high above the valley floor, the German army had a commanding vantage from which to rain sniper and artillery fire on the enemy. Young New Zealanders waded, often wounded, among mud, slush, rubble and the dead, searching for a way to end their war.
At the cemetery a former German paratrooper who was stationed at the abbey approaches a group of Kiwi vets. There’s a friendly exchange, an awkward camaraderie. Finally, one of the Kiwi vets says: “Next time you are up on the hill, don’t wear those sunglasses you have on. We might see the sun reflect in your lenses.” There’s laughter. Then silence. The breeze picks up and the men disperse without goodbyes.
An elderly German, Helmut Gille, proudly wears a crimson beret from his war. He was a sergeant paratrooper who commanded a group of men at the abbey. He’s here to honour the 28th Maori Battalion for being brave warriors. Gille remembers the day he arrived – he can even name the date, January 30. He remembers, too, how the world shuddered and quaked when American aircraft began bombing two weeks later.
The first group dropped 253,000kg of high explosives on top of the abbey. A second wave dropped a further 100,000kg. The bombing completely destroyed the sacred building. Gille says that once the bombing stopped, he and his men set up sniper positions among the rubble. Again they were able to watch every move the Kiwis made.
This account is supported by Kiwi soldiers, such as Jim Wright from Ashburton: “After the Yanks bombed the abbey, that just gave Jerry a crater to shoot from. Their snipers were deadly. God, that was frightening.”
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