The Monuments Men (8 page)

The walls of reality came crashing in at Palermo, the Sicilian capital. The Allies had bombed the city relentlessly as part of a diversionary air campaign, destroying the old harbor section, numerous churches and cathedrals, the state library, state archives, and the botanical gardens. Every official in the area, it seemed, was demanding action from the Allied Military Government (AMG), and everyone was directed to the one poor captain sitting in a folding chair in a threadbare corner of a shared office. The Sicilians were willing to help, but they needed explanations, assessments, financing for repairs, equipment, supplies, and skilled craftsmen for emergency work on buildings in danger of collapse. The archbishop wanted special attention paid to the churches… and to his personal palazzo. General Patton, whose U.S. Seventh Army troops had taken the city, wanted money to redecorate his barracks, the former palace of the king of Sicily.

Hammond didn’t have time to listen to all the questions, much less answer them. For more than a month, he wasn’t able to get out of the office to inspect any sites. Using his personal typewriter he had carried with him from home, he sent reports to the War Department, and long letters home, begging for information and reinforcements. Nothing came until September, when the British Monuments officer Captain F. H. J. Maxse finally arrived. But by then it was too late. When the Allies leapt from the toe of Sicily to mainland Italy on September 3, 1943, Hammond was still frustrated, confused, and hopelessly mired hundreds of miles away in Palermo. Even small, mostly rural Sicily had proven too much for the initial MFAA effort.

On September 10, 1943, a week after the Allied landing in mainland Italy, a jubilant Paul Sachs wrote to George Stout: “I should have written to you some time ago to tell you that your ‘brain child’ has finally taken shape in an official kind of way and, as you know, the President has appointed an American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in Europe with Mr. [Supreme Court] Justice Roberts as Chairman, and I have been asked to be a member of that Commission and I have accepted…. It seemed to me… that I ought to post you at once because not only is this commission the result of your great thinking and clear statements at the time of the Metropolitan meeting just after Pearl Harbor, but in a very true sense you seem to me the real father of the whole show… it is my deliberate opinion that the appointment of this Commission is due to your initiative, imagination and energy.”
3

Stout must have read the announcement with bemusement. Sure, he was the father, but what exactly had he birthed? Not the frontline, specialist force he had envisioned, but another layer of bureaucracy? Paul Sachs and the museum directors had, after more than two years of effort, pushed through their vision, not his.

On September 13, as U.S. Fifth Army fought desperately to hold on to its Italian beachhead at Salerno, Stout sent Sachs a reply. “I congratulate the U.S. Government and the chairman of the American commission on getting you to serve,” he told Sachs in his usual self-deprecating, biting, and slyly humorous style. “You are kind to give me so much credit in getting this work under way, but you magnify it one hell of a lot. Something far below the average set of brains is needed to figure out what ought to be done. Getting it done is what counts.”
4

March 20, 1941

Report to the Führer by Alfred Rosenberg, head of the main Nazi looting organization, known as the ERR

I report the arrival of the principal shipment of ownerless Jewish “cultural property” [Kulturgut] in the salvage location Neuschwanstein by special train on Saturday the 15th of this month. It was secured by my staff for Special Purposes [Einsatzstab] in Paris. The especial train, arranged for by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, comprised 25 express baggage cars filled with the most valuable paintings, furniture, Gobelins, works of artistic craftsmanship and ornaments. The shipment consisted chiefly of the most important parts of the collections Rothschild, Seligmann, Bernheim-Jeune, Halphen, Kann, Weil-Picard, Wildenstein, David-Weill, Levy-Benzion.

My Staff for Special Purposes started the confiscatory action in Paris during October 1940 on the basis of your order, my Führer. With the help of the Security Service (SD) and the Secret Field Police [Geheime Feldpolizei] all storage—and hiding—places of art possessions belonging to the fugitive Jewish emigrants were systematically ascertained. These possessions were then collected in the locations provided for by the Louvre in Paris. The art historians of my staff have itemized scientifically the complete art-material and have photographed all works of value. Thus, after completion, I shall be able to submit to you shortly a conclusive catalogue of all confiscated works with exact data about origin plus scientific evaluation and description. At this time the inventory includes more than 4000 individual pieces of art, partly of the highest artistic value. Besides this special train the masterpieces selected by the Reichsmarschall—mainly from the Rothschild collection—have been forwarded in two special cars to Munich already some time ago. They have been deposited there in the air raid shelters of the Führer-building.…

Over and above the main shipment there are secured in Paris a large number of additional abandoned Jewish art possessions. These are being processed in the same sense and prepared for shipment to Germany. Exact accounts about the extent of this remaining shipment are at the moment not available. However, it is estimated that the work in the Western areas will be finished entirely within two to three months. Then a second transport can be brought to Germany.

Berlin, 20 March 1941 A. Rosenberg

CHAPTER 7

Monte Cassino

Southern Italy

Winter 1943–1944

U
.S. Fifth Army landed on mainland Italy near Salerno on September 9, 1943. It was supposed to be a surprise landing, with no air or naval support, but as the troop carriers approached the shore near Salerno the Germans shouted out over a loudspeaker in English, “Come on in and surrender. We have you covered.” The Americans came in firing anyway, and the battle was one of the bloodiest of the war. The campaign hadn’t been much easier since. The battle for the major airfields at Foggia was so intense, for instance, that afterward the decimated 82nd Airborne Division had to be merged with the British X (Tenth) Corps.

Nonetheless, Fifth Army took its primary objective, the southern port city of Naples, on October 1. They pushed on immediately, taking the high ground south of the Volturno River on October 6. Before them stretched several hundred miles of rugged, mountainous terrain, dug through with fortifications and strung with four major defensive lines. The Italian surrender, offered on September 3, the day of the first Allied landing on the mainland, had been announced on September 8, but Hitler had not been caught off guard. He had anticipated Italy’s lack of resolve and stationed German troops throughout the country. As the Italian soldiers laid down their weapons, hardened German troops had swarmed in to take their place. They were well-trained, battle-tested, determined… and everywhere. The weather deteriorated. Drenching rain turned the mud roads into bogs, then freezing cold turned those bogs into ice. Rivers skipped their banks; troop bivouacs flooded. The treacherous mountain terrain north of the Volturno allowed the Germans to engage and retreat with deadly efficiency. German observers on the mountain peaks called in nearly continuous artillery fire. Allied commanders had hoped to be in Rome before the onset of winter. When the sleet started falling, they weren’t even halfway there.

On December 1, Fifth Army entered the Liri Valley. Flanking units fought the Germans on the snowy peaks, while the main body of troops moved through the valley in a driving rain, mostly under cover of darkness, always under fire. Forty-five days later, they finally reached the other end of what was already being referred to as Purple Heart Valley, because of the vast number of soldiers wounded or killed in action there. Before them lay the town of Cassino, the anchor of the Gustav Line, the Germans’ main defensive entrenchment south of Rome. The mountain ridge above the town offered a commanding view of the valley, allowing the Germans to turn back an Allied assault on January 17, 1944. For weeks, the rain pounded the huddled men, and the temperature froze them in their boots. Another Allied assault was turned back, with high casualties, and still the shells poured down as steady as the rain.

The mountain was bad, but far worse for the weary soldiers was what stood atop it: the formidable, towering, thousand-year-old abbey of Monte Cassino. The monastery had been founded by Saint Benedict around AD 529, during the last days of the Roman Empire, partly because its excellent defensive position offered protection from a pagan world. It was at Monte Cassino that the saint wrote the Benedictine Rules, establishing the tradition of monasticism in the Western world. It was there he died and was buried. The abbey was sacred ground, an intellectual center and “a symbol of the preservation and cultivation of the things of the mind and the spirit through times of great stress.”
1
Now the grand and imposing abbey seemed to glare down at the weary and bloodstained Allied troops, a symbol of Nazi strength.

Western Allied commanders didn’t want to destroy the abbey. Only weeks earlier, in one of his last acts before leaving Italy, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had issued an executive order stating that important artistic and historical sites were not to be bombed. Monte Cassino, one of the great achievements of early Italian and Christian culture, was clearly a protected site. Eisenhower’s order had provided exceptions. “If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men,” he wrote, “then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go.”
2
But he had also drawn a line between military necessity and military convenience, and no commander wanted to be the first to test that line.

So for a month, the Allied commanders vacillated, and for a month the Allied soldiers hunkered down in the valley of death. The weather was brutally cold. There seemed no end to the rain. Many days, the clouds were so thick the troops couldn’t see the monastery, and the world was nothing but the blackened trunks of shell-damaged trees. Then the clouds would lift, and the abbey would stare down at them. Day after day, the troops slogged through grasping, freezing mud, wet to the bone and hounded by German shells. The press picked up on the misery, reporting not just on the squalid conditions but the growing list of dead and wounded men. The more the press and soldiers looked to the mountain, the more they saw the abbey not as a world treasure but as a leering death trap, bristling with German guns. The name Monte Cassino echoed around the world: the mountain of death, the valley of sorrow, the one building keeping Western Allied forces from Rome.

The citizens back home, appalled by the suffering of their boys, wanted Cassino destroyed. The British commanders wanted Cassino destroyed. The soldiers wanted Cassino destroyed. But some American and French commanders were opposed, unconvinced the Germans were inside. Brigadier Butler, deputy commander of U.S. 34th Division, remarked, “I don’t know, but I don’t believe the enemy is in the convent [
sic
]. All the fire has been from the slopes of the hill below the wall.”
3
Finally the British, and especially the Indian, Australian, and New Zealand forces designated for the first wave of assault on the entrenched Germans, won out. Major General Howard Kippenberger, leader of the New Zealand forces at Monte Cassino, summarized the need for bombing this way: “If not occupied today, it [the abbey] might be tomorrow and it did not appear it would be difficult for the enemy to bring reserves into it during an attack or for troops to take shelter there if driven from positions outside. It was impossible to ask troops to storm a hill surmounted by an intact building such as this.”
4

On February 15, 1944, amid the cheers of Allied soldiers and war correspondents, a massive aerial bombing destroyed the magnificent abbey at Monte Cassino. General Eaker of the U.S. Army Air Forces hailed it as a great triumph, an example of what the Germans could expect for the rest of the war.

The rest of the world did not cheer. Instead, the Germans and Italians turned the tables on the Allies, suggesting that if this was what the world could expect then the Allies were the barbarians and the traitors. Cardinal Maglione, speaking for the Vatican, called the destruction of the abbey “a colossal blunder” and “a piece of gross stupidity.”
5