If you didn’t know the history, didn’t know anything at all, you could be forgiven for thinking that Montecassino is today as it has been for more than a millennium, a single unbroken continuity extending back to Saint Benedict in 529.
It took me two hours to arrive at this point, standing atop the staircase leading to the basilica, staring back across the piazza that opens up dramatically to the valley far below. A light rain harried my ascent, just persistent enough to require attention, but never sufficient to merit concern. After a few early switchbacks along the main road, passing a Roman theater along the way, the route shifted over to a cobblestone footpath, climbing all the more steeply as a consequence. I was pleased to stroll through the empty parking lot and up to the front gate ten minutes before opening time, and then proceeded to watch as two tour buses pulled up behind me. The first half of my visit thus became a game of tag, as I hustled ahead of the hordes to claim a cloister, basilica, or crypt as my own, lingering as long as possible until the wave crashed in behind me.
The looming presence of World War II is impossible to avoid completely; the Polish cemetery, just around the corner, demands recognition, after all. But the abbey itself, its serenity somehow resistant even to the bustling tour groups, exudes a timeless quality, as though neither alpha nor omega could cross its threshold. Credit the restoration team, then, for its efforts. For eighty years ago, this was little more than dust and ashes, rubble and heartbreak, fury and futility.
“Succisa Virescit.” The motto of Montecassino couldn’t be more fitting. “Cut down, it grows anew.” Most of those choppings are little more than bullet points–a Lombard raid early in the abbey’s history in 570, a Saracen incursion in 883, and a devastating earthquake in 1349. Name me one place in Italy that doesn’t have an equivalent set of tragedies; it’s difficult, after all, to maintain a 1500-year winning streak. Overlooked in the cutting and growing department is the abbey’s origin, but it bears mentioning that Benedict and his followers first destroyed the Roman acropolis and temples dedicated to Apollo that remained on the mountaintop before initiating their own building campaign.
Ultimately, though, none of that holds a candle to what happened here on February 15, 1944, when the Allies bombed the hell out of the birthplace of Western Christian monasticism. After all, it was bomber number 666, piloted by Major Bradford Evans, that led the attack, one of 239 total bombers to sweep over Montecassino, unloading 453 tons of bombs in the process. What’s smaller than smithereens? That’s all that was left; among the destruction were hundreds of refugees and exactly zero Germans.
For three months, the Allied advance had been thwarted, stuck in “death valley” by the German-maintained Gustav line. There were disagreements among leadership about how to proceed. One school of thought, the “Franco-Indian flanking strategy,” called for bypassing Montecassino completely, and in hindsight this likely would have worked. However, influential voices insisted that the only way was through; to break the Gustav line, they asserted, it must be snapped at its crucial point, the abbey itself, and the town of Cassino before it. In the aftermath of the bombing, Franklin Delano Roosevelt claimed that, despite the precious loss of the historic abbey, the move was essential: “the Germans were using it to bombard us. It was a German stronghold, with artillery and everything necessary.”
Sixty years later, the The Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi made a very different claim, arguing that, “nobody could ever forgive the destruction of what had been for more than a thousand years a beacon of European civilization, the abbey of Saint Benedict.” With the benefit of historical clarity, it’s far easier to align with him than FDR. Here are three reasons.
First, if Nazi forces had been utilizing Montecassino as a military base, from which to hammer Allied forces, it would be fair to question whether it might merit targeting. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence to suggest that this was the case. Instead, there appears to have been a dramatic failure in the realm of military intelligence. To offer one example, consider the story offered by Captain David Hunt, aide to British Field-Marshal Harold Alexander, who recalled an intercepted exchange that read, “Ist der Abt noch im Kloster?” followed by the response of “Ja”. The key here centers on “Abt,” which was translated at the time as the abbreviation of “military division.” As a consequence, this was interpreted as, “is the military division in the abbey?” and “yes.” However, “Abt” could just as easily be read as “abbot,” making the question center on the persistence of the monks’ presence in the church–something which, indeed, they maintained throughout. Furthermore, the Germans had respected the neutrality of the space, allowing the monks to maintain their practice while also tending to refugees. So, in sum, there’s no compelling evidence to suggest that this was a military base for the Germans.
Second, even if Montecassino hadn’t been employed as a base of operations, perhaps you could make a case that a shock-and-awe bombardment might open things up, allowing for Allied forces to push through and collapse the Gustav line. Here’s the problem: the day before the bombing, General Bernard Freyberg realized that his contingent were too far from Montecassino to be able to take the abbey ruins before the Germans. However, the air force had other obligations, so it was now or never, and Freyberg went for “now.” The bombing occurred, German forces seized the smoking mountaintop, and then proceeded to hammer the town of Cassino with a barrage of their own weeks later. American tanks were stopped dead in their tracks, unable to pass through the massive craters made by Nazi and Allied bombardments alike.
Third, a private communication from Dwight D. Eisenhower to FDR weeks prior to the bombing asserted that, if they were ultimately forced, “to choose between the destruction of a famous monument and the sacrifice of our soldiers, then our soldiers’ lives will count infinitely more.” It’s the Hiroshima and Nagasaki argument–we’ll protect our own, even at the cost of others. The logic is easy to track. Again, though, there is no evidence to support a claim that this reduced Allied casualties; it certainly didn’t reduce refugee casualties.
Oddly enough, though, as I wandered through the basilica, slack-jawed at the opulence, I couldn’t help but wonder if its resurgence is an argument for not holding historical places dear, at the cost of human life. If one could make the case that the bombing of Montecassino had opened the way forward for the Allies and saved lives, perhaps the beauty of the place today is proof that it’s not just a fair trade, but an essential one.
I paid my respect to Saints Benedict and Scholastica in the tomb and gradually worked my way out of the abbey, taking my first steps on the Cammino di San Benedetto past the Polish cemetery and off into the hills. It would have been easy for the walk to prove anticlimactic after such a dramatic start to the day, but the footpath wound its way along the hill’s edge, the whole valley opening wide beneath me, and I couldn’t help but marvel at how peaceful and majestic “death valley” could be.
My final destination for the day, Roccasecca, perhaps deserves the “Succisa Virescit” motto even more than Montecassino. For all the talk about the importance of “location, location, location,” with the implication being that this is the key determinant of success, it must be acknowledged that a great location can be a double-edged sword; the more desirable your situation, the more grasping hands that will come reaching for it. And Roccasecca has a wonderfully strategic location, with a mountain (owned for many years by the Aquinas family of Saint Thomas), situated at the entrance to two gorges, and a crossing point for the Melfa River, used by many armies. As a consequence, though, it changed owners like the weather, suffered repeated raids, and eventually became the base of operations for a contingent of the Nazi Panzerkorps, resulting in its own round of Allied bombardment. Decades of slow, plodding reconstruction would follow.
As with Montecassino, one could be blind to this recent tragedy, aside–and this is admittedly a big aside–from the war memorials. Today, Roccasecca feels like a warm, friendly, and thoroughly comfortable hill town. My host found me strolling aimlessly in the center and then guided me to my home for the night; the small alimentari welcomed me in and merrily chatted away as I fumbled through the tightly-packed shelves. And, as always, a young boy is pummeling the stone walls of town with a soccer ball, the kind of loud banging noise that, eighty years later, is far more characteristic of these Italian towns.
In the American retelling of World War II, the spotlight shines so brightly on France that it leaves little room for anything else in Europe. So many only know a partial history. D-Day, the Normandy beaches, the dramatic eastward push. And, of course, this is “the greatest generation,” the triumph of good over evil, the tidiest war narrative ever devised. In the midst of that, Italy somehow gets lost in the wash. But good lord, did this peninsula pay one hell of a price.
