February 9
The Battle of Monte Cassino, 1944
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino

The Battle of Monte Cassino (also known as the Battle for Rome and the Battle for Cassino) was a costly series of four battles during World War II, fought by the Allies with the intention of breaking through the Winter Line and seizing Rome.

In the beginning of 1944, the western half of the Winter Line was being anchored by Germans holding the Rapido, Liri and Garigliano valleys and certain surrounding peaks and ridges, together known as the Gustav Line. The Germans had not occupied the historic hilltop abbey of Monte Cassino, founded in AD 524 by Benedict of Nursia and which dominated the town of Cassino and the entrances to the Liri and Rapido valleys, although they manned defensive positions set into the steep slopes below the abbey walls. On 15 February, the monastery, high on a peak overlooking the town of Cassino, was destroyed by 1,400 tons of bombs dropped by American bombers. The bombing was based on the fear that the abbey was being used as a lookout post for the German defenders (this position evolved over time to admit that German soldiers were not garrisoned there but that the risk of the monastery becoming occupied justified the action). Two days after the bombing, German paratroopers took up positions in the ruins; the destruction caused by the bombing and the resulting jagged wasteland of rubble gave troops improved protection from air and artillery attack making it a more viable defensive position. From 17 January to 18 May, the Gustav defenses were assaulted four times by Allied troops. For the last of these the Allies gathered 20 divisions for a major assault along a twenty mile front and drove the German defenders from their positions but at a high cost.[7]...

During prior months in the Italian autumn of 1943, two German officers, Captain Maximilian Becker, a surgeon in the Hermann Göring Panzer Division and Lieutenant Colonel Julius Schlegel of the same unit, with singular prescience proposed the removal of Monte Cassino’s treasures to the Vatican and Vatican-owned Castel Sant'Angelo before the war would come closer. Both officers convinced church authorities and their own senior commanders to use the division’s trucks and fuel for the undertaking. They had to find the materials necessary for crates and boxes, identify skilled carpenters among their troops, recruit local laborers (to be paid with rations of food plus twenty cigarettes per day), and then manage the "massive job of evacuation centered on the library and archive," a treasure "literally without price."[57] The richness of the Abbey’s archives, library and gallery included "800 papal documents, 20,500 volumes in the Old Library, 60,000 in the New Library, 500 incunabula, 200 manuscripts on parchment, 100,000 prints and separate collections."[58] The first trucks, carrying paintings by Italian old masters, were ready to go less than a week from the day Dr. Becker and Schlegel independently first came to Monte Cassino.[59] Each vehicle carried monks to Rome as escorts; in over one hundred truckloads the convoys nearly depopulated the Abbey’s monastic community.[60] The task was completed in the first days of November 1943. "In three weeks, in the middle of a losing war, in another country, it was quite a feat."[60] After a mass in the basilica, Abbot Gregorio Diamare formally presented signed parchment scrolls in Latin to General Paul Conrath, to tribuno militum Julio Schlegel and Maximiliano Becker medecinae doctori "for rescuing the monks and treasures of the Abbey of Monte Cassino."[61]...

Monte Cassino and Cassino have different meaning for the various participant nations of the battles. For the western Allies, monuments and inscriptions invoke God and country and sacrifice and freedom;[62] for the Poles it stood as a "symbol of hope for their country."[63] For the Germans and their veterans it was altogether different. Monte Cassino "represented the courage ... of their soldiers defending against Allied matériel strength," superior numbers and overwhelming firepower, a precursor of events to come.[63] They "fought with ... great skill ... No crimes stain the German record here, nor were there any self-inflicted horrors like Stalingrad," and — that they were able to "save the treasures of Monte Cassino and the museum and gallery of Naples [endures as] a point of particular pride."

United States military history reviews
The U.S. government’s official position on the bombing of Monte Cassino underwent remarkable changes over a quarter century. The certainty of “irrefutable evidence” of German use of the abbey was removed from the record in 1961 by the Office of the Chief of Military History. A congressional inquiry to the same office in the 20th anniversary year of the bombing produced the statement: “It appears that no German troops, except a small military police detachment, were actually inside the abbey” before the bombing. The final correction to the U.S. Army’s official record was made in 1969 and concluded that “the abbey was actually unoccupied by German troops.”[66]

Reflection
All the military intelligence available at the time of these battles
was not enough to ascertain the truth of the situation.
All the more reason we should not be looking for war and violence to solve our problems
but look to the One who is the Way the Truth and the Life .crsr