The 80th anniversaries of many significant World War II battles fall in the years from 2019 to 2025. The New Zealand Division was in Italy in 1943-44.
The 2nd New Zealand Division, initially the New Zealand Division, was an infantry division of the New Zealand military forces (New Zealand's army) during the Second World War. The NZ Division was made up of 15,000-20,000 men, divided into three infantry brigades (the 4th, 5th and 6th Brigades), plus artillery, engineers, signals, medical and service units. Each brigade initially had three infantry battalions (numbered from 18th to 26th). The 28th (Māori) Battalion was a specially formed battalion that was at times attached to each of the Division's three brigades. Each battalion was commanded by a lieutenant-colonel.
The action at Cassino in early 1944, as the New Zealand division progressed through Italy, was a major engagement for the 28 (Māori) Battalion. The battalion's own website states that “Of all the battles involving the Māori Battalion in the Second World War, none was more brutal or costly than the struggle for Cassino.” This story focuses on the Maori Battalion.
The fighting took place around the small town, under the shadow of Monte Cassino and the 6th century Benedictine abbey on its summit. Cassino had to be taken by the Allied troops as it was a key pivot in the German defensive Gustav Line and in a direct line on the road through to the Liri Valley and the route to Rome, the Italian capital they had as their goal.
In the darkness of a February winter night, a ten-man reconnaissance patrol of Māori Battalion soldiers probed towards the railway station in the small Italian town of Cassino. They drew enemy machinegun fire, letting the New Zealanders assess the obstacles the main attacking soldiers would face in the coming days.
They would find out that, secreted in the rubble, in cellars, behind walls, and in houses not completely flattened – and firing from the slopes of Monte Cassino – were enemy strongpoints manned by German paratroopers determined to hold Cassino. A few enemy tanks were also concealed in buildings.
It was 1944 and the Allied landing at Anzio has taken place. But inland at Cassino, where American attacks had failed early in February, it was the turn of the New Zealand Division.Waves of American bombers on February 15 had reduced the abbey on top of Monte Cassino, the houses of the town and surroundings to rubble and rain-filled craters that would deter the tanks and make infantry progress gruelling.
Unfortunately, the infantry attack planned to follow up the bombarMāoridment did not take place until a day and half later, losing the New Zealanders any advantages gained and allowing the German defenders to dig in again.
The Māori Battalion's B Company's objectives were the station buildings and the engine shed and then 300 metres of sunken road leading to Cassino and bordered by a scattered group of houses.
A Company was to clear the railway yards and capture a small mound, a hummock with entrenched machineguns, south of the engine shed. The engineers, who had already repaired four of the demolitions on the railway embankment which led to the station, were to have the necessary bridges and fillings completed before daylight.
As the official history put it, the plan was that immediately the road was open 19 Amoured Regiment would send tanks through to support the Māori troops and secure the bridgehead. This would be followed by an American combat team of 180 tanks, with 21 Battalion infantry and 4 NZ Armoured Brigade with nearly as many tanks, and with 23 Battalion – all would break out into the Liri valley.
The Māori Battalion was to make the initial bridgehead but in the event, the supporting follow-up never happened.
Historian Neville Phillips in the offical volume on the New Zealand Division in Italy set out the atrocious odds which were noted in retrospect, but which the 28 Battalion had no idea lay ahead of them.
He wrote that the skill of the German defenders was matched by the strength of their defences. They had the natural advantages of steep hills, the Rapido river and the mud, and had had time to add deep shell-proof dugouts in the rock and armoured pillboxes, to set complex traps of wire and mines, to demolish all the approach routes and to contrive awkward flooding by blowing up the river stopbanks.
New Zealand soldiers moving through ruins of the town of Cassino.
]Source: Ref: DA-05507-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand]
“To move forward along the causeway, with the impediments of wire, mines and water under hostile eyes on Monastery Hill, as 28 Battalion had to do, was like walking a tightrope in a shooting gallery. The Māoris' predicament was the worse because every inch of the ground was covered by crossfire. In spite of, or perhaps because of, distinctly meagre German artillery support, the German infantry's fire plan was well co-ordinated and allowed them to deluge the bridgehead with fire from three sides and to deny supporting weapons access to the battle. This was a significant achievement, for it put the tired Māoris at the mercy of an armoured counter-stroke and proved, more than any other single fact, to be decisive.” All this lay ahead.
Because of constant withering fire from Spandau machineguns and background mortars from the dug-in German troops, almost all the Cassino action took place in darkness.
On the night of February 17, shortly before the troops were to cross the start line at 9.30pm, there was a final check-up and a short Ringatu service led by Lieutenant Takurua (12 Platoon), originally a truck driver from Ruatoki. It would be the last service that he would give. A few words by the commanding officer, and A Company, followed closely by B, moved off in single file along the railway embankment leading to the station more than a kilometre away.
The official history records that the night held a series of unpleasant surprises. Late in starting and slowed down by the heavy going, the Māori troops advanced across fields sown with mines, and before long mortars and machineguns on the lower slopes of Monte Cassino and the southern edge of the town began to range on them. Men began to fall to the fire and the mines, and the returning trickle of stretcher-borne casualties became a stream. B Company, which had suffered badly on the minefields, took an hour to reach the entrance to the station yards and A Company was moving scarcely any faster.
The Māori Battalion's typewritten diaries of the night record the action radioed back constantly: “2300 On the initial attack very heavy opposition was met from spandaus and mortars. Both companies reported they were held up by wire strung along the whole front."
Captain Matarehua (Monty) Wikiriwhi of B Company reported “As we closed, my 12 Platoon on right wavered momentarily in the face of a particularly violent burst of machinegun fire from two Jerry posts. I immediately ordered a charge—the men leapt forward and, as in training, two men leapt on to the wire (concertina)—the others jumped over (there was sufficient light from flares and gun flashes) and, with bayonet and grenades cleaned the posts out.”
The German troops would have been terrified by the fierceness of soldiers with a centuries-long tradition of remorseless close tribal combat.
At times devastating fire from spandau machineguns came from six directions.
By midnight, B company reported having attained its first objective (locality immediately around the railway station) and pushed onto the second objective, a further block of houses along the road.
Just after midnight, B Company reported its own artillery “stonk” (a sharp and fast artillery bombardment) was falling short and due to this had to fall back on their first objective and consolidate there. In the misdirected New Zealand gunnery shower, second lieutenant George Asher was killed.
The Asher name was well known in rugby league circles. George's father Ernest played for New Zealand and served as secretary of the New Zealand Māori Rugby League Board for 60 years. George was the only son of Ernest and May Asher.
In the early fighting, A and B companies lost a third of their strength in casualties. Captain Wikiriwhi received a nasty leg wound and went back to get ‘patched up’ at the Regimental Aid Post. He was back within half an hour to hear the news of George Asher's death.
Artillery exchanges from both sides continued to hammer the field of battle, some troops being concussed from the noise, and the general frontal attack broke down around the station into what Captain Henare of A Company described as “...sections and groups of men having individual scraps all over the place—a few prisoners here and there, a few dead Jerries...”
The fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the dark can only be imagined.
By 6.00am, moonlight and the breaking day were beginning to expose both companies more dangerously than ever. To an inquiry for directions, General Kippenberger replied with instructions to the Māori companies to stay forward. He hoped to minimise casualties by the use of smoke, and hundreds of smoke rounds were fired by hundreds of guns in the coming hours, having the double-edged effect of allowing cover for German troop movements. The murk enabled the enemy to get in so close that the Allied guns could not fire on them for fear of dropping their shells among their own soldiers.
A and B Companies were in much the same situation that the battalion had been in at Orsogna, where support arms could not get through and permission had been given to pull back; this time permission was refused and daylight found the companies overlooked by the towering Monte Cassino and under fire from three sides—from Cassino town, from the Hummock, and from the western approaches to the railway station.
The success of the Māori troops had as a prerequisite the success of the engineers' repairs to allow tanks and support through. For the engineers, Second-Lieutenant Thomas Higginson, a long way from his sheep farm in Waikane, reported on the still unfilled breaches in the embankment (he was later to die of wounds received in action at Cassino).
Now came the Māori soldiers' time of trial, records the history. Between sunrise just after 7.00am on 18 February and sunset at 6.00pm, for nearly eleven hours the two companies, now weakened by about 50 casualties, faced the fury of the enemy and their counterattacks around the railway station with nothing to defend themselves but the weapons they carried, the fire of the artillery and an undependable pall of smoke. Tanks and heavy weapons could not now reach them until after dark.
The Germans manned the western environs of the station in strength and, though visibility through the smoke was less than 100 metres, they could be seen moving about in the haze.
All through a torrid day, the Māori soldiers withstood the infiltration tactics of a determined enemy. An attempt to reinforce them with a platoon from C Company was frustrated when 12 of the men were shot down before they had gone a hundred metres. Up in the railway station A and B Companies had already lost 76 men killed and wounded.
Overshadowed by the scowling eminence of the monastery ruins, the New Zealanders engaged in fierce fighting in the station yard and in the southern outskirts of the town throughout the 18th until soon after 3.00pm the Māori troops were forced back by a determined German counter-attack supported by mortar and machinegun fire and tanks.
Casualties mounted (Charlie Hapeta, Albert Heke, Patrick Kereti, and Barney Brass).
At 3.40pm wireless communication failed between HQ 28 Battalion and the two companies so that nothing was known of the German counterattack and its success until the first of the Māori soldiers arrived back east of the Rapido stream at about 4.00pm.
They had been helpless. They had neither tanks nor anti-tank guns with them. Caught by the point-blank fire of the tanks, B Company's foremost platoon was overrun. The survivors of the two companies escaped from the station and struggled wearily back under parting volleys which cost them more casualties.
Communication breakdown on this day was also a problem with the telephone lines run along the ground by signals division being constantly cut by shells. Two signalmen killed while repairing a regimental line in the open were former shop assistant 28-year-old signalman Athol Tankersley, previously Mentioned in Dispatches, and the driver of the section's line truck, signalman 21-year-old Charles Mckeown.
The Māori platoons could deal with infantry while their ammunition lasted, but when two German tanks overran sections of 10 and 12 Platoons Captain Wikiriwhi ordered a withdrawal.
He reported later: “When tank attack came in I was with remnants of my Coy HQ right in the station, i.e. 1st objective. The forward sections must have been overrun by then. They were not more than 50 [yards] from us and opened up with 75 mm and machineguns. That was when I gave the order to withdraw.”
More men were hit returning to the start line. The trek out of town away from the railway station came to be known as the Mad Mile, “eyes strained forward for obstacles such as stranded vehicles, dead men, and holes in the road.”
Captain Wikiriwhi stopped to rally some who had taken cover from the firing and was seriously wounded in the leg by machinegun fire. Lieutenant Takurua and two others dragged him to the shelter of the railway embankment and used his pistol lanyard as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. He ordered them to leave him there and get back while they might. Takurua was killed a few minutes later.
Those who did get safely back --- 26 Arawa and 40 Ngapuhi --- were a pitiful remnant of the 200 who had gone into the attack. A few more straggled in during the night.
The second battle for Cassino and its environs had effectively ended, one that had been waged at the sdame time as Indian, Gurkha and English troops made unsuccessful attempts to take the summit of Monte Cassino and surrounding high points, with the loss of many lives.
The history is clear. In an attempt to penetrate one of the strongest fortresses of Europe by two companies of infantry with a simultaneous diversion against the well-nigh unassailable keep of Monte Cassino and the abbey, the Māori soldiers were sent on a forlorn hope.
Left behind on his orders, Captain Wikiriwhi was presumed to be a prisoner of war. However, as he lay he found that a piece of board and a discarded gas cape were within his reach. He split the board with an Italian stiletto he had carried since the days in the desert and fashioned a pair of splints to hold a leg shattered with machinegun bullets so that it was possible to move. When it was dark he crawled up on to the railway line and, in spite of his severe wound, he propelled himself painfully with the aid of two pointed sticks and, using the railway sleepers as levers, hauled himself back to safety in a venture that took a day and a night.
The battalion diaries recorded “A very meritious incident catching the praise and admiration of the whole division. He was evacuated to the Advanced Dressing Station. Many messages of praise and admiration received for him."
For his actions, Captain Wikiriwhi was awarded the Military Cross (MC) to add the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) won at Takrouna in north Africa when he was simultaneously battalion intelligence officer, adjutant and acting commanding officer. Originally a shepherd, he gained a diploma in farm management post-war and worked as a rural valuer and farm supervisor for the Māori Affairs department. He was the first Māori Battalion association secretary. While troubled continually by his leg, he continued to play sport. Wikiriwhi died in 1988 aged 70.
The fight for Cassino was unrelenting, but the next major assault was postponed for three weeks while troops waited in the freezing wet for wintry conditions to deliver good weather to suit men and vehicles.
On March 15, after waves of bombers and a barrage of artillery set up a three-hour bombardment of the town of Cassino from which the residents had fled, the New Zealanders advanced again to the well-known forward positions, the railway station and now an attempt to take the Continental Hotel manned by German troops.
Bravery and black humour marched arm in arm in the continual attacks that continued for days.
The offical history recorded that Sergeant Mataira led 17 Platoon up a narrow street and, noticing a door swinging open, went through to make a quick investigation. As soon as he went in the door slammed and he was in the bag. At the same time a machinegun firing on a fixed line down the lane forced the platoon to take shelter. Apparently Mataira yelled to his men to pitch a grenade over the wall—there wasn't any roof—and in the commotion that followed he emerged wounded but still able to shoot a couple of his late captors. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) for his exploit.
For 31-year-old Rukutai Haddon, it was a far cry from his work as a sawmill hand in the town of National Park, with the central plateau mountains of Ruapehu, Ngaruahoe and Tongariro in the background. In the Italian battleground of Cassino, Monte Cassino loomed close by, a constant presence beside the Māori Battalion soldiers. Sergeant Haddon, in the middle of the fierce enemy shelling that hit his troops, was killed while trying to rescue one of his men lying wounded in the open.
In the end it was the weather as much as the enemy that prevented the complete clearing of Cassino. Torrential rain filled the bomb craters, adding to the difficulties of 19 Armoured Regiment struggling to support the infantry.
On March 19, co-ordinated frontal assault soon ended with fire from enemy posts directly ahead. It was not so much an attack as a game of hide-and-seek—a grim game with a sudden penalty for the loser (Thomas Himiona Rakau). As soon as one post was silenced another opened fire from a different direction and eventually a platoon of Māori soldiers had to take shelter in cellars and what remained of houses.
Troops continued to operate among the bomb holes and rubble and only parts of buildings standing while Allied tanks now were able to take on some of the German tanks. The artillery smothered the hillside with smoke and high explosive. The enemy in return smothered Cassino with mortar bombs.
Lieutenant Morrin of New Zealand's 19th Armoured Regiment reported being called on by the 28 Māori Battalion's warrant officer Martin McRae to fire on an enemy tank discovered at the end of a long room in a ruined building. He said they obliged with high-explosive anti-tank shells from the 75mm cannon and belts from the Browning machinegun “at various openings, doorways and windows, in the building. This went on for some time.”
Morrin continued, “We noticed one of the Māoris, there were only two of them, had a Hun prisoner by then and the following was most natural and realistic. McRae made the Hun to understand if he told the rest of the Huns to surrender all would be well, if not he would be shot...The movement of McRae's tommy gun was dinkum enough. The Māori won out OK and in next to no time Huns were everywhere, dozens of them. I think there were round 70-80 that came out alright and, with the dead and wounded, the score for the building would be near the 100 mark.
“I omitted to mention that the prisoner was pulled out of the tank in the room. He was the wireless operator and McRae's observation was done by looking through a doorway which led into a long corridor.” McRae was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM).
The official history is acid in its assessment of the March attack. “On its military merits alone no competent soldier would have chosen to assault Cassino in March 1944. He would have looked askance at the very notion of trying to carry by storm the strongest fortress in Europe in the dead of winter by a single corps unsupported by diversionary operations. He would have waited to attack in a better season with larger forces on a broader front, and he would probably have expected the decisive breach to be made elsewhere than at Cassino. While the first and third battles were related to a general offensive, the second was a lone enterprise. When General Freyberg came to plan it after the failure of Operation Avenger on 18 February, its purpose was partly to relieve the weight on our troops at Anzio, where the counter-attack was reaching its climax.”
The 21st Battalion was the last to be thrown into the battle. It attacked on the night 20-21 March along Route 6, the boundary between the two brigades, but like everybody else was stopped by the Continental Hotel and other strongposts in Cassino.
Daylight found 23, 28, and 21 Battalions practically in line, with the final objectives as far away as ever. That night all battalion commanders went out by tank to a conference at Headquarters where each detailed the difficulties and the situation in his area.
Further frontal attacks were ruled out, but a possible avenue lay alongside the side of the hill from Castle Hill, trying for the Continental Hotel from its rear. One company from 21 Battalion and another from the 23rd made the attempt but they failed, and that was the last New Zealand effort to clear Cassino. Despite the best efforts of American, New Zealand, and Indian divisions, Monte Cassino still blocked the road to Rome.
The history records that General Freyberg was determined not to make a Passchendaele of Cassino (In the First World War, on October 12, 1917, in an attack at the village of Passchendaele in Flanders, Belgium, in one afternoon 843 New Zealand soldiers were either killed or lay mortally wounded between the front lines). The official history asserts that this determination was an essential clue to Freyberg's attitude in the closing stages of the battle, and it may have carried weight with General Alexander when Freyberg decided on 23 March to call off the operation.
The New Zealand Corps headquarters was dissolved on 26 March and control was assumed by the British XIII Corps. In their time on the Cassino front line, the 4th Indian Division had lost 3000 men and the 2nd New Zealand Division 1600 men killed, missing, or wounded.
Polish and British troops linked up in the last actions. In mid-May, after German troops withdrew, the Polish flag was raised over the ruins of the abbey on Monte Cassino where exhausted Polish troops found only 30 wounded German soldiers who had been unable to move.
Neville Phillips, who became professor of history at Canterbury University, wrote the story of the New Zealanders in Italy, Volume I, The Sangro to Cassino, in the official history of New Zealand in the Second World War 1939-1945. Having volunteered in London, he served with the 140th Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery alongside the New Zealand Division at Cassino, so knew the conditions and circumstances of the battle in the area. His bitter-sweet words that conclude the official history reflect philosophically on the fight for Cassino:
“The historian of the battles of Cassino who revisits the scene finds no relief from the difficulty of commemorating them in a way that will do justice to the New Zealanders who fought there, but he is impressed anew by the need for making the attempt. For except in its boldest features, the face of the land has changed even in so short a time. To stand on the summit of point 593 on the tenth anniversary of the peace was to be engulfed in a tranquillity made the more immense by the emphasis of a few simple sounds – the chime of a cowbell, a skylark's glee and far below beside the new white abbey, the shouts of black-robed novices as they skirmished with a football. Earth heals her own wounds and the husbandry of a thousand peasants has tended the growth of twelve successive springs. Ruins are dismantled and new buildings arise on the sites of old. Men remember but their memories fade and finally die with them. And of the deeds bravely done and the hardships bravely borne, soon nothing will remain but the imperfect record itself.”
Phillips had grown up in Palmerston North where an inspirational English teacher at Palmerston North Boys' High, Amyas Zohrab, suggested journalism for the boy. Phillips's first steps were at newspapers before he became interested in history, a love he passed onto his son the historian Jock Phillips. Ten years after the war ended, Phillips senior revisited Cassino where he had the melancholy experience of standing at the grave of Amyas Zohrab who died of wounds received in action at Cassino while serving with the New Zealand infantry in 21 Battalion.
Beside Zohrab's grave in the Cassino War Cemetery, under the imposing presence of Monte Cassino and the rebuilt abbey on its summit, lie the graves of 456 other New Zealanders.
Sources:
Historical Publications Branch, 1957, Wellington. The Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War 1939–1945:-
Phillips, N C, Italy Volume I: The Sangro to Cassino
Cody J F, 28 (Māori) Battalion
Sinclair, D W, 19 Battalion and Armoured Regiment
Cody, J F, 21 Battalion
Borman, C A, Divisional Signals
28 Māori Battalion https://www.28Māoribattalion.org.nz
NZ History https://nzhistory.govt.nz
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino
Phillips, J, Chapter 10 Neville Phillips and the Mother Country. Scholars at War, Australasian Social Scientists, 1939–1945 (ANU.Lives).