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A review by royzee
Monte Cassino: The Hardest Fought Battle of World War II by Matthew Parker
5.0
A tough read about the "tough old gut".... I read quite a lot of WW1 books and sometimes during this account I thought I was back there. So much for all the advances in three decades!
I knew a fair bit about this part of the war despite it being overshadowed by other campaigns especially D-Day that came soon after the fall of Rome. But this book really opens your eyes to the ferocity of warfare in WW2. It is saddening reading through one failure after another... and then the usual boasting of how it would be a walkover lads... reminded me of what they said before the Somme.
Quite how the German paras withstood the hurricane of shellfire and bombs will never be known. Yet when it stopped out they came again to defend to their utmost.
All that behind the most fiendish of defences made representatives of just about all the Allied fighting forces struggle like never before or since.
I learned much from this book - about the heroic success of the French and how it was sometimes tainted by certain of their troops... How we owe so much to soldiers from other places such as India and Nepal, from Poland, from "down under" and across the Atlantic... all took their turn in the hell that was Cassino.
Well done Mr Parker... if I said I enjoyed your book I think I would be leaving this with a troubled mind. You opened up a door to scenes humanity should long remember and swear it must never happen again.
I knew a fair bit about this part of the war despite it being overshadowed by other campaigns especially D-Day that came soon after the fall of Rome. But this book really opens your eyes to the ferocity of warfare in WW2. It is saddening reading through one failure after another... and then the usual boasting of how it would be a walkover lads... reminded me of what they said before the Somme.
Quite how the German paras withstood the hurricane of shellfire and bombs will never be known. Yet when it stopped out they came again to defend to their utmost.
All that behind the most fiendish of defences made representatives of just about all the Allied fighting forces struggle like never before or since.
I learned much from this book - about the heroic success of the French and how it was sometimes tainted by certain of their troops... How we owe so much to soldiers from other places such as India and Nepal, from Poland, from "down under" and across the Atlantic... all took their turn in the hell that was Cassino.
Well done Mr Parker... if I said I enjoyed your book I think I would be leaving this with a troubled mind. You opened up a door to scenes humanity should long remember and swear it must never happen again.