Word: cassino
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Inch by Inch. Throughout the week the spectacular fighting around the beachhead almost obscured the main Italian battlefront, 53 miles to the east and south, where Fifth Army troops were grinding away at German strong points in and around Cassino. There too, howling storms of rain, sleet and snow gave the Germans an advantage. U.S. troops were battering their way into Cassino, house by house, but the Nazis still controlled at least two-thirds of the town, and were fighting back from the cellars even as tanks pounded the houses down around their ears...
Presumably Alexander, Wilson and their generals had planned soundly enough, but there had also been some sound and speedy counterplanning by Nazi Field Marshal Kesselring, who held firm at Cassino and hustled in reserves from northern Italy, France and the Balkans to ring the beach...
...week's end the Allies were reported to be bombing the Nazi-occupied 6th-Century Abbey of Monte Cassino, where St. Benedict founded the Benedictine order of monks, 1,415 years...
...Cassino, linchpin of the Gustav Line, had to fall before the Nettuno attackers could move. Held long enough, it might even enable the Germans, rushing down fresh troops from north Italy and pulling seasoned outfits out of the Gustav Line, to force abandonment of the beachhead...
...Once Cassino fell, the Gustav Line would have to fold. With sounder timing, that should have happened in the first week of the Nettuno landing. But somehow, almost encircled, Cassino held. Result: when the beachhead soldiers pushed forward they were driving against no rear area disorganized and road-clogged with retreat. They were banging their heads against a well-organized, coolly conducted, unfettered line of resistance...