Download or read book The Mules of Monte Cassino written by Jim DeFilippi and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacrifice, slaughter, and stupidity. The Battle for Monte Cassino, in southern Italy during the bitter winter of 1943-1944, was the most gruesome, spine-wilting, pointlessly devastating battle of America's Twentieth Century, perhaps in all of America's history. The enormity of the mistakes of Monte Cassino was misunderstood and overlooked then and remains under-reported and ignored to this day. Three hundred and fifty thousand dead soldiers, along with no accurate count of the civilian dead, for no reason other than the hubris and egos of men with golden stars pinned on their shoulders, hobnobbing with Popes, Presidents and Prime Ministers. Priceless and irreplaceable art treasures were destroyed for no better reason than incompetence and impatience. Military advantage gained from all of this: nothing. This is the story of that battle told from the fox holes and from the blood-stained rivers, with the hands of wounded and drowning comrades clutching at your legs as you try to swim back to shore. One survivor of the devastation said, "We were all of us mules."
Download or read book Monte Cassino written by Peter Caddick-Adams and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2013 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an authoritative account of the lesser-known yet devastatingly brutal battle waged by the Italian campaign during World War II.
Download or read book Cassino to the Alps written by Ernest F. Fisher and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Monte Cassino written by Peter Caddick-Adams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-22 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected as a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2013 The most horrific battles of World War II ring in the popular memory: Stalingrad, the Bulge, Iwo Jima, to name a few. Monte Cassino should stand among them. Waged deep in the Italian mountains beneath a medieval monastery, it was an astonishingly brutal encounter, grinding up ten armies in conditions as bad as the Eastern Front at its worst. Now the battle has the chronicle it deserves. In Monte Cassino, military historian Peter Caddick-Adams provides a vivid account of how an array of men from across the globe fought the most lengthy and devastating engagement of the Italian campaign in an ancient monastery town. Not simply Americans, British, and Germans, but Russians, Indians, Georgians, Nepalese, Ukrainians, French, Slovaks, Armenians, New Zealanders, and Poles, among others, fought and died there. Caddick-Adams offers a panoramic view, surveying the strategic heights and peering over the shoulders of troops fruitlessly digging for cover in the stony soil. Here are incisive sketches of the theater commanders--Field Marshal "Smiling Albert" Kesselring, who outmaneuvered Rommel to command German troops in Italy, and the English aristocrat General Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, tall, upbeat, "and--crucially for Churchill--looked every inch a general." Caddick-Adams puts Cassino into the context of the Italian campaign and larger Allied war plans, and takes readers into the savage, often hand-to-hand combat in the bombed-out medieval town. He captures the brutal weather and unforgiving terrain--the rubble and rocky slopes that splintered dangerously under artillery barrages and caused shellfire to echo with such volume that men had trouble keeping their sanity due to acoustics alone. Over four months, the struggle would inflict some 200,000 casualties, and Allied planes would level the historic monastery-and eventually the entire town as well. With scholarly care, insightful analysis, and narrative verve, Caddick-Adams has crafted a monumental account of one of World War II's lesser-known but no less devastating battles.
Download or read book Monte Cassino written by Matthew Parker and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The six-month battle for Monte Cassino was Britain's bitterest and bloodiest encounter with the German army on any front in World War Two. At the beginning of 1944 Italy was the western Allies' only active front against Nazi-controlled Europe, and their only route to the capital was through the Liri valley. Towering over the entrance to the valley was the medieval monastery of Monte Cassino, a seemingly impenetrable fortress high up in the 'bleak and sinister' mountains. This was where the German commander, Kesselring, made his stand. MONTE CASSINO tells the extraordinary story of ordinary soldiers tested to the limits under conditions reminiscent of the bloodbaths of World War One. In a battle that became increasingly political, symbolic and personal as it progressed, more and more men were asked to throw themselves at the virtually impregnable German defences. It is a story of incompetence, hubris and politics redeemed at dreadful cost by the heroism of the soldiers.
Download or read book Monte Cassino written by Matthew Parker and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monte Cassino is the true story of one of the bitterest and bloodiest of the Allied struggles against the Nazi army. Long neglected by historians, the horrific conflict saw over 350,000 casualties, while the worst winter in Italian memory and official incompetence and backbiting only worsened the carnage and turmoil. Combining groundbreaking research in military archives with interviews with four hundred survivors from both sides, as well as soldier diaries and letters, Monte Cassino is both profoundly evocative and historically definitive. Clearly and precisely, Matthew Parker brilliantly reconstructs Europe’s largest land battle–which saw the destruction of the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino–and dramatically conveys the heroism and misery of the human face of war.
Download or read book The Battle of Monte Cassino written by Melchior Wankowicz and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Melchior Wańkowicz’s The Battle of Monte Cassino is a unique contribution to the history of World War II, indeed the history of war in general. Composed by the Polish master of reportage, this book provides the reader with an exhaustive history of one of the greatest triumphs of Polish arms: the conquest of the German redoubt of Monte Cassino, after months of intense fighting, which provided the Allies with an open road for their progress through the Italian peninsula and, finally, to victory over the Nazis in Europe. The history of the Battle of Monte Cassino (17 January — 19 May 1944), centered on the Benedictine cloister of the same name, which was a key sector of the Nazi Army’s ‘Gustav Line’ of defense. Besides the history of the long Allied siege and the eventual victory won through the efforts of General Anders’ II Polish Corps, Wańkowicz provides an on-the-spot account of the battle, at which he was present, setting the reader in the very midst of operations by his thorough and lively interviews with the soldiers who took part in it.
Download or read book Salerno to Cassino written by Martin Blumenson and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Tank Attack at Monte Cassino written by Jeffrey Plowman and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early morning, 19 March 1944. Tanks manned by New Zealanders, Indians and Americans launch a daring attack along a narrow mountain track on German positions north of Monte Cassino. So began one of the most audacious Allied attempts to break through the Gustav Line and advance on Rome and it almost succeeded. Yet the extraordinary story has seldom been told, and it has never been told before in the vivid detail Jeffrey Plowman brings to this new account. Using operational orders, combat reports, unit diaries, post-battle photos from private and public archives and the graphic personal accounts of those who took part, he describes the construction of Cavendish Road and the course of the entire operation that followed. The planning for the attack and the men involved are described in a gripping and clear-sighted way, as is the attack itself its initial rapid success and its ultimate failure. Eighty years later Jeffrey Plowman reveals exactly what happened and shows how and why this bold thrust against the German strongpoints at Monte Cassino, which could have turned the course of the battle, ended in retreat. His book also features a visitors guide that covers the length of Cavendish Road from the village of Caira to Massa Albaneta, linking each spot with the events described in the narrative.
Download or read book Battle for Monte Cassino written by George Forty and published by Ian Allan Publishing. This book was released on 2004 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle for the Benedictine monastry on the hilltop of Monte Cassino between January and May 1944 was one of the most dramatic in the Battle for Italy. The author examines in detail this struggle to open up the road to Rome. Drawing upon archive photographs and first hand reminiscences, the author sets the scene for the conflict, examines the forces ranged against each other and describes each of the four major battles.
Download or read book The Battles for Monte Cassino written by Jeffrey Plowman and published by After the Battle. This book was released on 2022-09-21 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battles for Monte Cassino encompassed one of the few truly international conflicts of the Second World War. A strategic town on the road to Rome, the fighting lasted four months and cost the lives of more than 14,000 men from eight nations. Between January and May 1944, forces from Britain, Canada, France, India, New Zealand, Poland and the United States, fought a resolute German army in a series of battles in which the advantage swung back and forth, from one side to the other. From fire-fights in the mountains to tank attacks in the valley; from river crossings to street fighting, the four battles of Cassino encompass a series of individual operations unique in the history of the Second World War.
Download or read book Battlefield Rations written by Anthony Clayton and published by Helion and Company. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Army marches on its stomach, observed Napoleon, a hundred and fifty years later General Rommel remarked that the British should always be attacked before soldiers had had an early morning cup of tea. This book, written to raise money for the Army Benevolent Fund and with a Foreword by General Lord Dannatt, sets out the human story of the food and "brew-ups" of the front-line soldier from the Boer War to Helmand. Throughout, the importance of the provision of food, or even a simple mug of tea, for morale and unit fellowship as well as for the need of the calories required for battle is highlighted with many examples over the century. For many, until 1942, the basis of food was "bully beef" and hard biscuit, supplemented by whatever could be found locally, all adequate but monotonous. Sometimes supply failed, on occasions water also. The extremes of hardship being when regiments were besieged, as in Ladysmith in the Boer War and Kut el-Amara in Iraq in the 1914-18 war. At Kut soldiers had, at best, hedgehogs or birds fried in axle-grease with local vegetation. On the Western Front the Retreat from Mons in August 1914 was almost as severe. The transport of food is as interesting a story as the food itself, ranging from oxen, horses, mules, camels, even reindeer and elephants to motor transport and aircraft in different theatres at different times. The first airdrop of food, not very successful, was in fact at Kut el-Amara in 1916. The inter-war years experiences of mountaineers and polar explorers, supplemented by academic diet studies of the unemployed in London and North England led to the introduction of the varied composite, or 'compo' rations, marking an enormous improvement in soldiers' food, an improvement commented upon by the bully beef and biscuits-fed 8th Army advancing into Tunisia from Libya on meeting the 1st Army which had landed in Algeria with tins of compo. The Italian campaigns of 1943-45, especially the Salerno and Anzio landings and the battle for Monte Cassino, presented particular difficulties. At Cassino food reached forward units on mules with Basuto muleteers and Indian porters for the last stage to men in ground holes or scrapes. Soldiers landing in Normandy and fighting on into Germany were generally well fed even during a hard 1944-45 winter. The worst suffering, though, fell on soldiers in the Burma campaign, especially in the Chindit columns. In one unit, the only food available at one time was the chaplain's store of Communion wafers. Many men died unnecessarily from the results of poor feeding. In the end of empire colonial campaigns soldiers were generally well fed even if the food was monotonous. Units in the Korean War experienced difficulties at the onset; in the Borneo jungle campaigns of the 1960s the problem was not so much the provision of food for patrols as how to eat it without the smell of the food and refuse from the packs giving positions away. For the Falklands War special cold weather compo had to be provided and was eaten on the long 'yomps' or 'tabs' marches. The soldier on the streets of Northern Ireland often lived on egg "banjo" sandwiches but real hardship was suffered by one Welsh battalion besieged by the Serbs in Gorazde during the Bosnia operations when Vitamin C deficiency led to scurvy. The book ends with food supply, often based on whole or part swapping with American military food (usually below British standards) in the Iraq operations and in Afghanistan. An appendix sets out the contents of a typical box of rations issued to a soldier in Helmand in 2011, very generous in quantity and easily prepared. One side of the box carries a stern message to the effect that a soldier must consume the entire contents in order to maintain full fighting efficiency. Such injunctions were not marked on the boxes of food sent forward to the troops in the Boer War; there the boxes were stamped with the initials of the Senior Catering Office Field Force. "Scoffs here at last." The work has been compiled from documents in the Royal Logistic Corps Museum at Deepcut, from memoirs, letters and interviews, and from the superb collection of regimental histories in the library of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. All royalties due to the author for this book will be sent to the Army Benevolent Fund, The Soldiers' Charity.
Download or read book Cyprus and its Regiment in the Second World War written by Marios Siammas and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-12-29 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the role of the Cyprus regiment, a military unit of the British Army, in the Second World War. Highlighting the contribution of Cyprus to the war effort, the book contributes to the limited historiography on the military engagement of Cyprus in the Second World War. Through an analysis of British official records and interviews the author aims to provide the required chronological and contextual placement of events involving Cyprus and the Cyprus Regiment. By drawing upon veterans’ narratives and operational insights, the book offers a personal view and assessment of the Second World War period. The book covers a number of themes, including the recruitment of Cypriots to the British Army and the training they received, the establishment of the Cyprus Volunteer Force, the experiences of Cypriot soldiers while serving in multiple countries, and the wider impact of the war on Cyprus, economically, socially and militarily.
Download or read book The War Against Germany and Italy written by Kenneth E. Hunter and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Journal of the Royal Army Veterinary Corps written by and published by . This book was released on 1941 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book From the Volturno to the Winter Line 6 October 15 November 1943 written by United States. War Department. General Staff and published by . This book was released on 1944 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book United States Army in World War 2 Mediterranean Theater of Operations Salerno to Cassino Paperback written by Martin Blumenson and published by Government Printing Office. This book was released on with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CMH 6-3-1. Facsimile reprint of the 1969 edition with a new title page and a paper cover. Discusses operations from the invasion of the Italian mainland near Salerno through the winter fighting up to the battles for Monte Cassino, including the Rapido River crossing, and the Anzio beachhead. Includes an envelope of maps with the label: A Portfolio of Maps Extracted From Salerno to Cassino. Cover title reads: Salerno to Cassino. Also on cover: World War 2 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition. Item 345. Related items: The World War II publications collection can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/catalog/us-military-history/battles-wars/world-war-ii Other products from the U.S. Army, Center of Military History (CMH) can be found here: https://bookstore.gpo.gov/agency/1061
