Monte Cassino
By December 1943, the phrase “sunny Italy” had evolved from being a travel agent’s selling point to becoming an ugly joke for the British and American troops of the Allied Fifth Army, advancing north from Naples to Rome. Read more
Monte Cassino
It was March 14, 1944, and Private Albert “Albie” Duddy of D Company, 1st/4th Battalion Essex Regiment, was staring up at the monastery on top of the hill at Monte Cassino from a location north of the town of Cassino, Italy. Read more
Monte Cassino
By the evening of January 22, 1944, it was increasingly apparent that a drastic shift in strategy was needed to break the bloody debacle that had developed in central Italy. Read more
Monte Cassino
For the thousands of Allied soldiers who had fought and suffered for so long in the shadow of the abbey of Monte Cassino, Tuesday morning, February 15, 1944, was a time of joy and celebration. Read more
Monte Cassino
Lt. Gen. Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, comprising the U.S. VI and British X Corps, headed north from the Salerno battlefield in September 1943, German Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander of Army Group C in southern Italy, implemented new defensive tactics and fortifications. Read more
Monte Cassino
I was born in Los Angeles in 1924 and attended local schools. In high school I enrolled in ROTC and, when I could, I went skiing for fun. Read more
Monte Cassino
Background: Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6, under the command of Major Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, had the fortune (or misfortune) to be stationed in Normandy at the time of the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944. Read more
Monte Cassino
It was a letter in the London Times that caught the attention of British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Read more
Monte Cassino
Despite the Nazi conquest of European nations during World War II, individual soldiers from the occupied countries rose again to fight the German Army, and the largest army in exile to fight the Germans was Polish. Read more
Monte Cassino
In the last days of March 1945, a soldier named Carl Getzel sat on a hill outside the city of Aschaffenburg and watched as it was slowly destroyed. Read more
Monte Cassino
By the autumn of 1943, the Allied armies fighting in Italy had discovered that Winston Churchill’s description of Italy as the “soft underbelly of Europe” had been a falsehood of monumental proportions. Read more
Monte Cassino
The Gustav Line, stretching across Italy at its narrowest part between Gaeta and Ortona, was a formidable system of defenses, some of it in coastal marshes but mainly in mountainous country through which ran fast-flowing rivers. Read more
Monte Cassino
I wrote previously about my guided three D-Day tours in the summer of 2014. I repeated the tour-guiding experience in May and June this year for the Minnesota World War II History Roundtable during a tour of Fifth Army battlefields in Italy. Read more
