German soldiers killed in action lie along the rubble battlefield at Pantano Mountain near Cassino on December 18, 1943, during the Battle of Monte Cassino on the Italian front in World War II. The corpses of German soldiers were left scattered in a valley of stone walls. Among the dead German soldiers were those whose leather boots had been stripped off.
The Battle of Monte Cassino was a series of four Allied attacks against positions held by German and Fascist Italian forces during the invasion of Italy. The Allied forces moved north through rugged terrain and harsh weather across hills littered with the dead of both armies; the Battle of Monte Pantano, fought in December 1943 above the clouds, was one of the most intense battles of the grueling Italian campaign.
January 17, 1944 marked the first day of the Battle of Monte Cassino. It was a major operation in which Allied forces broke through the Axis defenses in Italy and penetrated as far as Rome, bringing World War II to an end. Before Monte Cassino, the Allied forces first captured Monte Pantano, the anchor of the German winter defense line. The Germans heavily bombed Mount Pantano with mortars and artillery and bombed the area with fighter planes. Numerous Italian and German lines of defense severely hampered the Allied forces' northward advance toward the capital, Rome, and the four-month Battle of Monte Cassino was fiercely fought, inflicting heavy losses on the Allied forces.
The name of the battle came from the 1400-year-old church of Monte Cassino, located in the center of the German defensive line. During the battle, the church was heavily damaged by American bombers. The attack on Monte Cassino lasted four battles, in January, February, and March, and finally fell on May 16, when Allied bombardment caused the Axis defense line to collapse. The final capture of Rome was accompanied by heavy casualties, with at least 125,000 to 185,000 casualties on all sides, both Allied and German-Italian.
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