Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.
As Wednesday’s announcement fired the gun for a six-week battle for the General Election, last weekend was a sobering reminder of politics by other, more deadly, means. A landmark of the Second World War was remembered: the battle of Monte Cassino.
D-Day and the Normandy landings have always overshadowed the Allied effort to liberate Italy. But with Russian expansionism in Ukraine, the 1943/44 Italian campaign has lessons for today – as the President of Poland stated on Saturday.
Andrzej Duda was speaking at a ceremony of remembrance at the Polish War Memorial, sited at the base of Monte Cassino. A few miles away, a Commonwealth cemetery records the lives lost by British, Canadian, and New Zealand troops, as well as those from the Indian subcontinent, who were all part of Britain’s Eighth Army. They were casualties of Operation Diadem, the almost five-month-long struggle in early 1944 to take the mountain with its imposing Benedictine monastery where the forces of Nazi Germany were dug in.
First established by St Benedict in 529, the monastery was almost flattened by Allied bombing in February, as part of the second of four attempts to break German defences. Whether such cultural destruction was justified, or a war crime, was then the subject of debate. The controversy continues today.
The monastery is sited above the strategic Route 6, the main road to Rome, and is a vantage point allowing long-range views over the surrounding plain. It was a crucial link in the Gustav Line, a series of German defensive fortifications that spanned Italy from coast to coast.
Assuming that Italy would be, in Churchill’s phrase, the Axis powers’ “soft underbelly”, the Allied invaders soon found it to be one “tough old gut”, according to Mark Clark, the American commander. The impressive German defensive lines led to an intensity of war-fighting not seen since the Western Front, especially around the beachhead at Anzio (where Labour’s future Chancellor Denis Healey, a major in the Royal Engineers, was a beach master).
The British soldiers who fought at Monte Cassino and in the Italian campaign were known as the D-Day Dodgers, a name that became a bitter badge of honour. At the Commonwealth cemetery at Anzio are the graves of twins John and Robert Cairncross, aged 19, killed on the same day.
The fourth Allied assault on Monte Cassino was successful: on 18th May, men from the Polish 2nd Corps raised their nation’s flag over the ruins. Commanded by General Wladyslaw Anders, many had served with him since their Army’s defeat in September 1939 when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland. Tens of thousands had already endured much: years of imprisonment in Soviet gulags, release following the German invasion of Russia, and a march through Iran and Egypt to reach Italy.
One of the heroes of the campaign was Wojtek. A bear cub found in Iran, he was adopted by 22 Artillery Supply Company and later enrolled in the army. He carried ammunition to the guns.
Last weekend, President Duda linked Poland’s experience of Soviet invasion, Monte Cassino and Ukraine. “As an ally of Germany, it tore Poland into two parts, and it was from this Soviet occupation that the soldiers who died came here.”
He added: “‘Russiky mir’ [Russian world] is not Russian culture. It is brutal domination over another person subjugation of other nations, draining their blood, kidnapping their children to the east. It is Russification, the brutal force applied against other nations, which has nothing to do with modern democratic standards.”
Now in the pantheon of Polish heroes, General Anders’ ashes were interred at the cemetery in 1970, alongside the graves of 1,072 of his men. High above is the monastery, completely rebuilt. Last week, coachloads of the country’s scouts made a pilgrimage to Monte Cassino and took part in Saturday’s service.
From warfare to lawfare. This week, the lawyers of the International Criminal Court announced arrest warrants would be sought for Benjamin Netanyahu and his country’s Defence Minister for war crimes, not least for “starving” Gaza. (Perhaps they should be studying the images of captured Hamas fighters)
Some in the West now have serious questions to ask themselves, not least why they are cheering on lawyers who give moral equivalence to murderous Islamist terrorists and democratically elected politicians fighting a just war.
With Ukraine already burning, the Middle East a tinder box, and Georgia “at a crossroads”, this Better Call Saul approach to international relations is not only self-indulgent grandstanding but perilous. Unsurprisingly, the ICCS’s highly selective action is supported by Labour and the Shadow Foreign Secretary.
Why Israel’s leader? Why not Syria? Perhaps we should be on standby for the arrest of not only the surviving dregs of al-Qaeda, but also the leading members of the Labour government which 20 years ago waged what many still regard as illegal war in Iraq.
Last year, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. Lawyers’ jaw-jaw from the safety of the Hague had not made a jot of difference to the course of the war in Ukraine. What has helped is the practical military support that Britain under a Conservative government was the first to provide – and has continued to give.
Thankfully, Poland is not placing its faith in the publicity-hungry jurists of the ICC. Bordering Ukraine, living under the yoke of Soviet Communism from 1945 until the late 1980s, Poland is rightly wary of an expansionist Russia. Instead of relying on a Court and its warrants, which are unrecognised by Moscow and Washington among others, it has raised its defence spending to more than 4 per cent GDP.
We should be as grateful for the example being set by our NATO ally today as our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were to their gallant allies in 1944.
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Author: Dr Sarah Ingham
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