The 1st Div. Para ended 1943 in the Adriatic sector, on the front of the Sangro River where it had withdrawn from Apulia before the advance of Montgomery's 8th Army.
During the retreat, the paratroopers, applying the principle that a heap of rubble provides good cover for the defender while complicating the attacker's problems, had perfected the art of defending ruined villages and towns.
During the battle for Ortona (December 20-27), they destroyed buildings to create their own ruins.
Thanks to the poverty of the strategic and tactical thinking of the Allies, they would, for several weeks, be exempted from resorting to such expedients.
Churchill claimed that Orona "was our first big street battle and that it taught us a lot".
If lessons were indeed learned from this battle (and there is no formal proof), they were certainly not applied during the three great battles fought on the "Gustav Line" at Cassino.
Never, in fact, have defenders benefited from so many advantages offered by the clumsiness of their opponents.
The Battle of Cassino can best be described as follows.
To deny the Allies the Liri Valley and prevent them from seizing the Via Casilina (road no. 6) which leads to Rome, the Germans were to hold the hills surrounding
Cassino as well as the town itself.
To depress Cassino's position. the Allies therefore had to drive the Germans from these hills.
There were two ways to do this:by frontal attacks against the Germans who had all the advantages of the terrain, or by maneuvers of envelopment that would have forced them to withdraw.
It was the same choice that presents itself to a snail lover:either crush it with a blacksmith's hammer, or extract the animal from its shell. The Allies decided on the first method, and after four months of unsuccessful efforts, punished by heavy losses, only succeeded in strengthening Kesselring's position.
The latter, at Cassino, was entirely in front and devoid of reserves, especially after the Allied landings carried out on January 22 in its rear at Ansio and Nettuno. He constantly had to move stopgap units, chosen from among his best divisions, from quiet sectors to those that were more directly threatened; and it is by playing this clogging role that the Div. Para was launched in the First Battle of Cassino (January 17 - February 18, 1944).
On January 15, the German withdrawal to the Gustav Line was complete, and Lieutenant General Mark Clark's 5th Army, generously reinforced by the 8th Army, was preparing to attack Lieutenant General von Senger's XIV Panzer Corps. und Etterlin and to force the Liri valley.
Clark had developed an attack in three phases:first against the German right (coastal sector), then in the center (River Rapido) and finally on the left (heights of Cassino north of the Lin); the first phase was to start on January 17