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The Americans got no forwarder. If there had been no Germans there before, there were now. The Nazis moved swiftly into the ruins, to defend them in the best Stalingrad fashion. Soon out of the rubble pricked scores of gun barrels.
Down from the abbey trickled pitiful refugees, Italians caught in no man's land. They had been panicked by an Allied artillery warning of shells that exploded in a shower of leaflets warning of the coming bombing. The Germans had refused to let them leave the abbey. But the refugees, who said German machine guns were at every door, did not say that Germans had been in the abbey.
"Succisa Virescit." Said the German radio: "Outrage." For two days Nazi communiques flatly stated that there had been no German soldiers within the abbey or in its immediate vicinity. Said Field Marshal Albert Kesselring: "I have only the deepest contempt for the cynical mendacity and sanctimonious pictures with which the Anglo-Saxon Commands now attempt to make me responsible for their acts."
Radio Berlin next reported that Harold Tittmann, the U.S. Chargé D'affaires at the Vatican, had informed Cardinal Maglione, Papal Secretary of State, that the U.S. would rebuild the monastery. The Cardinal was supposed to have replied: "Even if you rebuild it in gold and diamonds, it still isn't the monastery."
But everywhere in Allied countries, leaders of all faiths accepted the destruction of the monastery in good faith that its destruction had been necessary. Said Archbishop Michael J. Curley of Baltimore: "Every Catholic throughout the world will understand." Wrote the Rt. Rev. Stephen Schappler, Abbott of Conception Abbey at Conception, Mo.: "True to the device on her coat of arms, Succisa Virescit (when cut down, it grows again), the Abbey of Abbeys will have a rebirth. For that right our own boys are giving their all. Benedictines the world over are grateful to them."
President Roosevelt expressed his regret at the act. But, he said, it had to be done.
Monument by Monument. But dust had not freshly settled over the Cassino abbey before the Allies faced another monument. Allied GHQ in Algiers announced that Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's summer palace, approximately twelve miles north of the Anzio beachhead, "contained a heavy saturation of Nazis." Five days later, Rome announced that Castel Gandolfo had again been bombed.
This time the Allied allegations were flatly denied by the highest Roman Catholic sources. In Washington, the Most Rev. Amleto Giovanni Cicognani,* Apostolic Delegate to the U.S. since 1933, stated, on instructions of Cardinal Maglione, that "no German soldier has been admitted within the borders of the neutral pontifical villa." The National Catholic Welfare Conference then issued a statement that Castel Gandolfo was filled with 15,000 Italian refugees, "several hundred" of whom had been killed in recent Allied bombings.
* Mgr. Cicognani is the personal representative of the Pope to the U.S. Government. He shuns the press, lives quietly in the $1,000,000 Apostolic Delegation on Washington's swank Em bassy Row.