jazzeum
Four Star General
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2005
- Messages
- 38,638
On Feb. 15, the Allied planes came, 250 of them dumping 1,300 bombs and 1,200 incendiaries. Scores of refugees, mostly women and children who had sought shelter in the abbey, were slaughtered. “Four hundred civilians,” Mr. Atkinson said, “is as good a guess as any. But no Germans. That’s quite clear to history.”
The abbey was pulverized. The Germans would quickly burrow into the smoking ruins after the bombers left, as Clark predicted, because the Allies did not follow up the attack with adequate troops to seize the initiative. Where the enemy had in fact not been terrorizing Americans, now it had a fresh, formidable redoubt. This bought the Nazis months of time and bogged the Allies down. Through the spring thousands of American, British, French, Polish and Italian soldiers, among others, would die fighting to make up for this shortsighted, misguided plan.
“It’s all too familiar,” Mr. Atkinson said. “Decisions were made in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion, without any second or third or fourth order effects being contemplated.”
We reached the abbey’s interior through immense stone walls. Bathed in sunshine, with burbling fountains, it was an oasis packed with tourists, the reverse of San Pietro. Once the site of a temple to Apollo, the monastery had been visited by Charlemagne, sacked by Saracens and destroyed by an earthquake in 1349. Broad stone steps, flanked by statues of St. Benedict and St. Scolastica, rise toward the abbey’s basilica, painstakingly reconstructed with ancient bronze doors from Constantinople. A labyrinthine museum, testifying to the antiquity of the site, contained pictures by some of the artists, including Luca Giordano, whose great frescoes had been destroyed. Mr. Atkinson recalled Machiavelli: “Wars begin where you will, but they do not end where you please.”
Looking back, he said, General Clark had little choice. Churchill cabled Clark’s British superior, Harold Alexander: “What are you doing sitting down doing nothing?” Eisenhower went along. Under pressure, Alexander ordered the attack. Clark shot back a memo: “It is too bad unnecessarily to destroy one of the art treasures of the world.”
Afterward the Germans would even, briefly, seize the moral high ground, parading the elderly abbot who had survived before a news conference in Rome. “The incident gave the Germans a chance to say they were the ones who really cared about civilians,” Mr. Atkinson recounted. “Back then everybody at home was consumed by the war and identified with it. I remember in Vietnam the definition of alienation was fighting a war and hoping the other side wins. Today we have no sense in our country even of being at war. The message from the government is ‘Go shopping, don’t worry about it.’
“Ultimately, who was bottling up whom?” Mr. Atkinson continued. “The Allied argument for taking Italy was to tie up the Germans. But the Allies had a million forces in Italy, tied up themselves, which meant they weren’t in Normandy.” Twenty-two German divisions were in Italy in June 1944. There were 157 Nazi divisions to the east at the same time, 60 in the rest of Western Europe. The 608-day Italian campaign cost 312,000 Allied casualties, 23,501 American lives.
In Baghdad, where he has been reporting, Mr. Atkinson said, he heard military officials privately rationalize American casualties there based on their comparatively small number, but “you won’t hear that argument made publicly because sacrifice must be believed to be in a cause widely deemed worthy of the sacrifice.”
“Not long ago,” he added, “I came across a Time magazine article about the campaign here in Italy from the spring of 1944 with a headline, ‘Great Stupidity?’ I would say a chain of improvisation brought the Allies here, from North Africa, where the question in May 1943 had been what to do with a million troops who were finished in Tunisia. Normandy was still 13 months off. Roosevelt was content to fight a war of attrition. If not Italy, where?”
It was Pyle, the war correspondent, who summed up the whole campaign in late 1944, not long before he too would die, reporting the war from the Pacific:
“I looked at it this way — if by having only a small army in Italy we had been able to build up more powerful forces in England, and if by sacrificing a few thousand lives we would save a half million lives in Europe — if those things were true, then it was best as it was.
“I wasn’t sure they were true,” he added. “I only knew I had to look at it that way or else I couldn’t bear to think of it at all.”
The abbey was pulverized. The Germans would quickly burrow into the smoking ruins after the bombers left, as Clark predicted, because the Allies did not follow up the attack with adequate troops to seize the initiative. Where the enemy had in fact not been terrorizing Americans, now it had a fresh, formidable redoubt. This bought the Nazis months of time and bogged the Allies down. Through the spring thousands of American, British, French, Polish and Italian soldiers, among others, would die fighting to make up for this shortsighted, misguided plan.
“It’s all too familiar,” Mr. Atkinson said. “Decisions were made in a haphazard, piecemeal fashion, without any second or third or fourth order effects being contemplated.”
We reached the abbey’s interior through immense stone walls. Bathed in sunshine, with burbling fountains, it was an oasis packed with tourists, the reverse of San Pietro. Once the site of a temple to Apollo, the monastery had been visited by Charlemagne, sacked by Saracens and destroyed by an earthquake in 1349. Broad stone steps, flanked by statues of St. Benedict and St. Scolastica, rise toward the abbey’s basilica, painstakingly reconstructed with ancient bronze doors from Constantinople. A labyrinthine museum, testifying to the antiquity of the site, contained pictures by some of the artists, including Luca Giordano, whose great frescoes had been destroyed. Mr. Atkinson recalled Machiavelli: “Wars begin where you will, but they do not end where you please.”
Looking back, he said, General Clark had little choice. Churchill cabled Clark’s British superior, Harold Alexander: “What are you doing sitting down doing nothing?” Eisenhower went along. Under pressure, Alexander ordered the attack. Clark shot back a memo: “It is too bad unnecessarily to destroy one of the art treasures of the world.”
Afterward the Germans would even, briefly, seize the moral high ground, parading the elderly abbot who had survived before a news conference in Rome. “The incident gave the Germans a chance to say they were the ones who really cared about civilians,” Mr. Atkinson recounted. “Back then everybody at home was consumed by the war and identified with it. I remember in Vietnam the definition of alienation was fighting a war and hoping the other side wins. Today we have no sense in our country even of being at war. The message from the government is ‘Go shopping, don’t worry about it.’
“Ultimately, who was bottling up whom?” Mr. Atkinson continued. “The Allied argument for taking Italy was to tie up the Germans. But the Allies had a million forces in Italy, tied up themselves, which meant they weren’t in Normandy.” Twenty-two German divisions were in Italy in June 1944. There were 157 Nazi divisions to the east at the same time, 60 in the rest of Western Europe. The 608-day Italian campaign cost 312,000 Allied casualties, 23,501 American lives.
In Baghdad, where he has been reporting, Mr. Atkinson said, he heard military officials privately rationalize American casualties there based on their comparatively small number, but “you won’t hear that argument made publicly because sacrifice must be believed to be in a cause widely deemed worthy of the sacrifice.”
“Not long ago,” he added, “I came across a Time magazine article about the campaign here in Italy from the spring of 1944 with a headline, ‘Great Stupidity?’ I would say a chain of improvisation brought the Allies here, from North Africa, where the question in May 1943 had been what to do with a million troops who were finished in Tunisia. Normandy was still 13 months off. Roosevelt was content to fight a war of attrition. If not Italy, where?”
It was Pyle, the war correspondent, who summed up the whole campaign in late 1944, not long before he too would die, reporting the war from the Pacific:
“I looked at it this way — if by having only a small army in Italy we had been able to build up more powerful forces in England, and if by sacrificing a few thousand lives we would save a half million lives in Europe — if those things were true, then it was best as it was.
“I wasn’t sure they were true,” he added. “I only knew I had to look at it that way or else I couldn’t bear to think of it at all.”