"GENERAL DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER'S DECISION to invade the Italian peninsula, based on wishful thinking and best-case scenarios, had drawn the Allies into a campaign without clear strategic objectives beyond a vague desire to capture Rome and tie down German divisions. But pinning down those divisions obliged the Allies to execute offensive operations across a tormented landscape that goats would find challenging. The difficulty spiked considerably once German commander Albert Kesselring completed a series of defense-in-depth barriers across central Italy. The most formidable, the Gustav Line, ran from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, with the medieval Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino as its anchor point.
Perched atop 1,706-foot Monastery Hill at the confluence of the Rapido, Garigliano, and Liri River Valleys, Cassino dominated Route 6, the critical axis that followed the Liri Valley north to Rome. Cassino came to epitomize the slow, blood-spattered slogging march up the spiny peninsula, which replicated in its strategic futility and tactical frustrations the mud-soaked misery of the trench warfare of 1914–1918.
The long struggle in Italy might have proved even more humiliating for the Allies had it not been for the vital contribution of the Corps Expéditionnaire Français—a force that by May 1944 counted four divisions of French-led, largely North African troops supplemented by irregular Moroccan levies called goums. In the winter of 1943–1944 the CEF intervened in the conflict to break the stalemate at Monte Cassino.
The force was led by the wily, brilliant, and innovative General Alphonse Juin, whose hard-hitting fighters supplied the critical margin between victory and defeat at Monte Cassino in May 1944. U.S. general and Fifth Army commander Mark Clark conceded: "General Juin's entire force showed an aggressiveness hour after hour that the Germans could not withstand." He called it "one of the most brilliant and daring advances of the war in Italy." Juin broke the Gustav Line after convincing Clark to switch from his futile and bloody frontal assaults on Monte Cassino to a campaign of surprise, maneuver, and infiltration. Juin's French-led Muslim troops, especially the goums, proved particularly adept at mountain warfare. They almost single-handedly cracked the German front on the second day of the battle. Then, exploiting the breakthrough, they thwarted Kesselring's attempt to reestablish his front on the reserve Hitler Line, branching west of the Aurunci Mountains at Cassino…"
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