Battle for Monte Cassino (May-1944)
(fragment from the book "A Question of Honor" by Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud)

IN THE WINTER and spring of 1944, the Red Army surged west like a great, cresting wave. German divisions were routed, then swept aside. By May 1, the Soviets had captured nearly all of eastern Poland.
One Allied force was paying particularly close attention to the Rus-sians' progress. Three years before, most of the 60,000 men of II Polish Corps had been ragged, starving inmates in Stalin's frozen gulags. They had made their way down from Siberia and then, as part of a new Polish army, crossed through Central Asia and the Middle East before landing in Italy in February 1944. Their hegira, Harold Macmillan said, was a "classic of military prowess and courage." Now II Corps was a key ele-ment in Britain's Eighth Army, struggling up the Italian boot.
Most of the troops were natives of eastern Poland, with homes and families still there, and they huddled around radios at night to follow reports of the Russian advance with what Collier's correspondent Martha Gellhorn described as "agonized interest." Gellhorn, who spent several days with the soldiers of II Corps that spring in Italy, wrote of them: "They fight an enemy in front of them and fight him superbly. And with their whole hearts they fear an ally, who is already in their homeland." Gellhorn tried to assure the Poles that their fears were misplaced, that the world would honor their bravery and suffering by restoring their country's freedom and helping them rebuild. She told them she could not believe that a war fought to "maintain the rights of man will end by ignoring the rights of Poles." They looked at her with weary, jaundiced eyes, and she realized how she must have appeared to them: "I am not a Pole; I belong to a large free country, and I speak with the optimism of those who are forever safe."*
The Poles possessed an intense, ardent patriotism that Gellhorn and others, including the Poles' British and American comrades, found impressive but difficult to understand. II Corps was "more than a mili-tary formation," Macmillan remarked. "It was a crusade." Of the differ-ences that distinguished Poles from Britons, one Polish infantryman wrote: "We Poles have a completely different attitude to fighting. What the British soldier does is prompted by duty, whilst we respond to our sense of commitment and the need for heroism."
The men of II Corps and their commander, General Wladyslaw Anders, were particularly determined to put the lie to the barrage of Soviet propaganda in the West variously condemning the Poles as trai-tors, Nazi collaborators, and cowards who had been afraid to face the Germans in combat. Time and again, the Soviets singled out Anders and his men in their violent attacks, accusing them of refusing to join forces with the Red Army and of deserting the USSR in 1941, because they had been afraid to fight the Nazis. Obsessed with refuting those charges, the Poles in Italy vowed to defend their honor-and that of their nation.
They would do that in one of the most ferocious battles of what was arguably the most misguided and wasteful major campaign of the war. When the vanguard of Allied troops landed in Italy the previous autumn, their commanding generals had averred that routing the enemy would be relatively easy. But after the Italians surrendered, the Germans dug in. They occupied the mountains and hills of southern Italy behind the formidable Gustav Line, stretching across the Italian peninsula from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic. From those heights studded with pillboxes, barricades, and minefields, the Germans mowed down Allied infantrymen as they tried to ford raging rivers, wade through knee-high mud, and fight uphill in blinding snowstorms.
The linchpin of the Gustav Line was the Benedictine abbey atop Monte Cassino, blocking the way to Rome. All winter long, Allied attempts to capture the peak had been worse than futile: they had been a bloodbath. U.S. bombers were called in to demolish the abbey, even though it contained priceless collections of art and artifacts. But the Germans weren't in the abbey; they were in the area surrounding it. After the bombing, they quickly fortified the ruins and set to work dec-imating the thousands of Americans, Britons, Indians, and New Zealanders who clawed their way up the Cassino slopes in successive assaults.

Stymied at Cassino and trapped below on their Anzio beachhead, the Allies planned a major offensive in May to break the stalemate. II Corps was asked to take on the most difficult challenge: capturing Monte Cassino itself. From the moment they set foot on those rocky hills, the Poles would be under constant artillery and mortar fire from the strongly fortified German positions around and atop the summit. Their only cover would be makeshift shelters of sandbags and boulders. Yet bloody as the battle was certain to be, General Anders and his com-manders seemed enthusiastic about fighting it. Once and for all, they would answer Soviet lies about Polish cowardice. Just as important, in Anders's view, a victory at Cassino would give "new courage" to the resistance movement in Poland.
As they took up their positions on the hills, the Poles found them-selves in a surreal landscape of beauty and horror. Above loomed the smoke-shrouded mountain and the gaunt skeleton of the bombed-out abbey. In the valley below, red poppies covered the ground like a vast, deep carpet, and birds twittered under the hot spring sun. Up ahead, huge rats darted among hundreds of blackened, decaying bodies scat-tered on the blasted, treeless hillside-corpses of those who had tried and failed to take the mountain before. The bodies lay there, rotting in the sun, unretrieved and unburied, because of the withering German bombardment from above. The stench of death on the way up the slopes of Monte Cassino was overpowering.
On the night of May 11, 1944, the thunder of Allied artillery shattered the quiet from coast to coast as the massive Allied offensive began. In the darkness shortly before midnight, Polish gunners on the foothills poured fire on German positions, and at one o'clock on the morning of May 12, two Polish infantry divisions began scrabbling up the slopes. They were met, from the first, with such devastating mortar, artillery, and small-arms fire that the leading battalions were all but wiped out. Still, the Poles pressed on. They fought all that day and well into the night before they were finally ordered to fall back.

So enormous were their losses on the first assault that it took them five days to regroup. On May 17, Anders told them: "May your hearts be like those of lions." That night, they launched the second attack, a sav-age sweep up the mountainside that at times brought them into hand-to-hand combat with the Germans. Early the next morning, the word came: the Germans had abandoned their positions. After five months of deadly futility, the Poles, on their second try, had taken Monte Cassino, and the road to Rome was open.
Nearly 1,000 Poles were killed and more than 3,000 wounded in those two assaults. Among the dead were diplomats, writers, artists, the former chief of the Polish intelligence service, several former members of the Polish Parliament. The survivors were so exhausted, so battered, after the second attempt that it took some time to find men with enough strength to climb the few hundred yards to the summit and the monastic ruins. A patrol of the 12th Podolski Lancers finally made it to the heights. There, in the drifting smoke, amid fragments of shattered frescoes and broken statues, they raised a homemade regimental pennant.
As the standard gently fluttered atop the mountain, the sound of a bugle suddenly pierced the air. An unseen lancer was playing the Krakow Hejnal, a famous call celebrating a thirteenth-century trumpeter in Krakow, whose throat had been pierced by an arrow as he summoned his fellow citizens to battle against the Tatars. Commemorating the trumpeter's interrupted call to arms, the Hejnal breaks off abruptly, in the middle of a note. At the sound of the trumpet, one Polish officer recalled, thousands of hardened infantrymen wept like children. After their years of wandering and exile, they were hearing, from a suppos-edly impregnable German fortress, the "voice of Poland."

· Collier's declined to publish Gellhorn's story about the Poles. She was never told why hi later speculated that the editors found her article to be "too critical of our popular allies, the Russians."-Gellhorn, Face of War, p. 121.