‘Next time you invade Italy, don’t start at the bottom.” That was the post-war puckish advice to a British officer from the German general in command at Monte Cassino, the Catholic nobleman Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin.
The reason was geography. For the most part, Italy is a long, narrow peninsula, at Cassino barely 80 miles across. The Apennine mountains run along almost its entire length, over 800 miles, the coastal plains widening only near Rome. Numerous rivers flow east into the Adriatic or west into the Tyrrhenian sea. “Behind every hill there’s another river,” said US General Mark Clark, commanding the Allied troops trying to break through at Cassino, “and behind every river there’s another hill.”
