The Allied assault on Monte Casino ...

[Vern Humphrey]

The world's most glorious monastery, at Monte Cassino in Italy, was destroyed during the second world war because of a mistake by a British junior officer, according to new evidence in a book due out this week.

The officer - translating an intercepted radio message - mistook the German word for abbot for a similar word meaning battalion. His version convinced his superiors this meant a German military unit was using the monastery as its command post, in breach of a Vatican agreement which treated it as neutral.

Allied generals ordered a huge bombing attack. Only when the planes were in the air did a British intelligence officer, Colonel David Hunt, recheck the full radio intercept. He found that what it actually said was: "The abbot is with the monks in the monastery".


"Tragically, this was discovered too late," the book says. "The bombers were already approaching."

It's pretty clear that only leaflet shells were fired prior to the bombing, and no German troops were in the monastery.

[togor]

Clark's certainty on the subject notwithstanding, I'm yet to read a contemporary account of the political left lamenting our methods in WW2 more than anyone else. If anything it was the anti-Roosevelt rightists who had to muzzle it during that conflict.

[togor]

Maybe not a bullxxxxter, merely an idiot, like the vet who told me when I was a gun-crazy kid how much better a rifle the Mauser was compared to his M1. There WAS no artillery fire before the bombing.

With regards to your old vet, maybe he got tired of his front sight wobbling or something. Lots of vets claimed to prefer the M1903 to the M1. Maybe the general beefiness of the Mauser struck him right, and he never had an occasion to need the extra firepower of the M1 to keep his ass out of the sling.

[clintonhater]

Clark's certainty on the subject notwithstanding, I'm yet to read a contemporary account of the political left lamenting our methods in WW2 more than anyone else.

That's for sure! As long as it was fascists, fascist supporters or even tolerators, anyone in fact who'd not renounced their German citizenship before the war started, burning 'um all up alive, as in Hamburg & Dresden, was only what they deserved.

[Vern Humphrey]

That's for sure! As long as it was fascists, fascist supporters or even tolerators, anyone in fact who'd not renounced their German citizenship before the war started, burning 'um all up alive, as in Hamburg & Dresden, was only what they deserved.

And that's funny when you consider that the modern left are Facists themselves.

[togor]

And that's funny when you consider that the modern left are Facists themselves.

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