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.

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.

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.

On a rugged mountain in the center of Italy stands an ancient Benedictine monastery. It is January 1944, and Monte Cassino, the mountain on which the monastery stands, becomes the staging ground for one of the most fiercely fought battles of World War II. Young Domenic and his family, who live on a farm north of Monte Cassino, are helplessly caught in the war. With battle lines approaching, they struggle against all odds. Will they be caught hiding two escaped prisoners-of-war? Will the innocent people sheltering in the monastery survive? This fascinating novel is based on the true story of the fateful events at Monte Cassino during that long cold winter. In the fast-paced style of Storm-Blast and Sea Chase, Domenic's War is Curtis Parkinson at the top of his form.

The Allied forces' actions in and around Monte Cassino in Italy remain some of the most controversial of the Second World War. 'The Battles of Monte Cassino' is a fresh look at some of the key aspects of the battles - the controversial bombing of the Benedictine monastery, the effectiveness of the commanders involved on both sides, the consequences of the Anzio beachhead, the performance of the Germans - and why four agonising battles were needed to defeat the Germans at Cassino.

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.

Terrain has a profound effect upon the strategy and tactics of any military engagement and has consequently played an important role in determining history. In addition, the landscapes of battle, and the geology which underlies them, has helped shape the cultural iconography of battle certainly within the 20th century. In the last few years this has become a fertile topic of scientific and historical exploration and has given rise to a number of conferences and books. The current volume stems from the international Terrain in Military History conference held in association with the Imperial War Museum, London and the Royal Engineers Museum, Chatham, at the University of Greenwich in January 2000. This conference brought together historians, geologists, military enthusiasts and terrain analysts from military, academic and amateur backgrounds with the aim of exploring the application of modem tools of landscape visualisation to understanding historical battlefields. This theme was the subject of a Leverhulme Trust grant (F/345/E) awarded to the University of Greenwich and administered by us in 1998, which aimed to use the tools of modem landscape visualisation in understanding the influence of terrain in the First World War. This volume forms part of the output from this grant and is part of our wider exploration of the role of terrain in military history. Many individuals contributed to the organisation of the original conference and to the production of this volume.

As a German battalion commander Rudolf Bohmler fought in the front line during the fierce battles fought at Monte Cassino. After the war he wrote this remarkable history, one of the first full-length accounts of this famous and controversial episode in the struggle for Italy. His pioneering work, which has long been out of print, gives a fascinating insight into the battle as it was perceived at the time and as it was portrayed immediately after the war. While his fluent narrative offers a strong German view of the fighting, it also covers the Allied side of the story, at every level, in graphic detail. The climax of his account, his description of the tenacious defence of the town of Cassino and the Monte Cassino abbey by exhausted, outnumbered German troops, has rarely been equalled His book presents a soldier's view of the fighting but it also examines the tactics and planning on both sides. It is essential reading for everyone who is interested in the Cassino battles and the Italian campaign.

VOLUME FOUR OF SPIKE MILLIGAN'S LEGENDARY MEMOIRS IS A HILARIOUS, SUBVERSIVE FIRST-HAND ACCOUNT OF WW2 'Brilliant verbal pyrotechnics, throwaway lines and marvelous anecdotes' Daily Mail 'Desperately funny, vivid, vulgar' Sunday Times ______________ A voice is calling across the land, 'Bombardier Milligan.' 'Bombadier Milligan is dead,' I replied in a disguised voice. The voice replied, 'Then he's going to miss his breakfast.' The fourth volume of Spike Milligan's legendary account of his time in the army during World War Two begins as he and his regiment land in sunny Italy in 1943 ('The ship touched the beach very gently, so gently I suspect it's not insured'). After a bout of Sandfly Fever, from which he soon recovers ('I'm ready to be killed again'), our plucky hero is piddled on by a farm dog ('Mussolini's revenge?') before forging his way inland towards the enemy and the sound of guns ('We're getting near civilisation'), where matters suddenly take a dark turn ('I was not really me any more') . . . ______________ 'The most irreverent, hilarious book about the war that I have ever read' Sunday Express 'Milligan is the Great God to all of us' John Cleese 'The Godfather of Alternative Comedy' Eddie Izzard 'A totally original comedy writer' Michael Palin 'Close in stature to Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear in his command of the profound art of nonsense' Guardian

Roger Fazendin spent the last three years of his life collecting memories from his 756th Tank Battalion brothers who survived WWII and the Battle of Cassino. Fazendin's design was to give the comrades who fought in that battle, and their families, a full picture of "what the hell went on". Battle action is fast and disjointed; each soldier's grasp of the action is limited by the intense focus required by his specific orders, hardware, and survival imperatives. This book is a collection of material from over fifty survivors, with a half dozen primary contributors, into a coherent series of narratives. The results make for riveting reading. What is unique about this book is the fact that it is written by the men themselves-not by the commanders, not by historians, not by the military. It is a record written by mature men about the thoughts and memories recorded in their young minds while they were surviving the chaos and madness of unrelenting battle in terrible winter weather. Fazendin's additions of context and historical record make for a wise and compelling assembly of the experiences of one battle. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it.