In the Steps of our Father at Cassino & Anzio in the lead up to the liberation of Rome.

By Tim Cooper

The sound of birdsong and the scent of abandoned orange and lemon groves filled the air as my brother Toby and I made our way with an Italian film crew through the late April sunshine to the banks of the River Garigliano in Italy. How different from the sounds of gunfire and cries of wounded men that would have rung out through the cold wet January nights of 80 years ago. Our father, then a young army officer of just 27, was supervising a makeshift ferry to rescue the wounded across this wide and fast flowing river under constant shell fire during the First Battle of Cassino.

This was the start of our week long trip to Cassino, Anzio and the Bay of Naples to see where our father served, was later hospitalised and was eventually awarded the Military Cross (MC).

Dad was a Troop Commander responsible for 40 Gunners. There were four men to a stretcher who had to carry the wounded to the ferry and then on to safety on the other side. One particular night one troop made five trips of one and a half miles. The ferry was a boat / pontoon attached to ropes from both banks of the river allowing the boat with wounded to be pulled from one bank to the other. Mules would have normally done this type of work but I believe they were in short supply and anyway the very loud bangs in these dire circumstances would have made that impossible. Dad told me that after the event his superiors were amazed at how long he kept the ferry running as that part of the river was then in enemy territory.

The owners of a War Museum along with an Italian TV crew had brought us to this
spot. Dad’s MC recommendation had given us the army coordinates of the ferry’s location and Toby and Giuseppe Caucci from the museum worked out the exact spot on Google Maps using a coordinates translator.

The River Garigliano runs through the Castelforte valley in the Lazio region in central Italy. Today Castelforte is a lovely little town, however it was near totally destroyed in 1943/4 having had the misfortune of being on the Gustav Line / Garigliano Front. This was one of the lines that Kesselring, Hitler’s Commander in Chief in Italy, had chosen across the Apennine Mountains to try and defend Rome and the northern half of Italy.

A lovely couple Giuseppe & Paola, with the help of their student son Francesco, had a few years ago set up the War Museum of the Gustav Line / Garigliano Front to honour the liberation of Castelforte in May 1944. Paola told me that for too long the Italian people had swept under the carpet this dark period in their history but they now felt that it was time the children of today should know the full story. Giuseppe & Paola have weekday jobs and their museum is run by volunteers without any public funding.

Again with Giuseppe & Paola and the film crew from Rai3 TV, the national broadcaster, we visited the little village of Suio Alto very close to where that ferry was operated. Suio, like Castelforte and a lot of other villages and towns, had been decimated in the struggle between the Luftwaffe and the Allied bombing. We now had the honour of meeting one of its senior citizens, an elderly man formerly the village postman, called Alessandro Lefano. In February 1944 a 19 year old private called Ernie Foster from the 5th Hampshire Regiment was in Suio and heard the cries of a dying woman from the rubble of a bombed out building ‘save my child- save my child’. Ernie entered the building and not being able to do anything for the mother, saved the baby and took it to the local infirmary. A day or so later the baby’s father tracked down young Ernie and presented him with a golden locket as a token of thanks. That baby was Alessandro Lefano, the 81 year old man Toby and I were now being introduced to. Ernie and Alessandro met up some 50 years later and became firm friends and after Ernie’s death in 1992 Alessandro campaigned and was successful in having a piazza in Suio named after him. One resident of the village, on hearing about our visit, came out of her house and presented us with a large bag of Sicilian type lemons from the trees of her garden.

Our Dad was Lieutenant Richard (Dick) Arthur Cooper who served in the 57th (East Surrey) Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery. Prior to the Italian campaign, he and the 57th were with Monty and the Eighth Army at the Battle of El Alamein.

After the ferry crossing Dick and all those in his 192 Battery from the Garigliano front were then withdrawn and sent to the Anzio Beachhead. It was hoped the landings at Anzio would allow the Allies to cut the German supply lines to the Gustav line and liberate Rome from there. Sadly the Allied troops got bogged down here and it was not until May 1944 before they could break out.

At Anzio in early February 1944 Dick and 192 Battery were back in the anti-tank role. Dick and his troop were given the task of setting up additional gun emplacements (17 pounders) to defend the flyover bridge at Campo di Carne. This was the flyover across the main road from Anzio to Carroceto. Dick had only been there a few days when one evening, while reporting back to nearby Battery HQ, a Luftwaffe plane glided down with its engines shut off, firing its cannon and machine guns and dropping a shower of anti-personnel bombs. Seven were wounded including Dick severely and sadly two died. The war was now over for Dad.

It was then about a week later that this same flyover bridge took centre stage in the Battle of Aprilia. Operation Fischfang (Catching Fish), personally ordered by Hitler, was a massive attack by the Germans from their base in Aprilia in order to drive the Allies back down the road to Anzio and into the sea. The flyover is where the Allies took up their defensive position and 192 Battery were in the thick of it. What took place was one of the most terrible and bloody battles of the Second World War and among the two sides more than 10,000 men were either lost, wounded or missing.

Back to 2024, we were parked up by a modern Italian overpass. A brown sign read “On this site thousands of men fought and died”. We soon found the exact spot where Dad was wounded and had our photos taken, both with a tear in our eye. Then on a lovely country road on our way to have lunch in modern day Aprilia, we came across at the side of the road in a little valley, a stone memorial to a Lt. Eric Fletcher Waters. Eric had died during Operation Fischfang and his body never found. The memorial had been placed by his son Roger Waters, bass guitarist and songwriter of Pink Floyd.

For two days of our week long trip we employed an Italian campaign guide called Danila Bracaglia from Monte Cassino Battlefield Tours. For the days we spent with Danila and her mini van driver we travelled around various places Dick would have known. We also stopped at a number of Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries where Toby and I laid poppy crosses for all those of 192 who gave their lives. The mini van also traversed the steep mountain to the beautiful Abbey of Monte Cassino, that now looked so different after the bombing of 80 years ago. We also shared this experience with a lovely Canadian couple called Greg and Debbie who were at the same time following in the footsteps of Greg’s father Roy Kirkpatrick who had served in a US / Canadian regiment, The First Special Service Force.

If you have little idea of how to follow your own father or grandfather’s footsteps in Italy, we can certainly recommend Danila’s services.

Our trip was also helped by Dick’s service records and the 192 Battery war diaries held at the National Archives together with the personal diary of Lt. Col. Anderson Smith, the Commanding Officer of the 57th. This diary is now held at the Imperial War Museum and Col. Anderson Smith could have been court marshalled if it had at the time been known that he was keeping it. We also had the excellent services of a very useful book “The Story of the 57th (East Surrey) Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery” privately printed by Ray Goodacre and available online.

As well as Castelforte, we visited two others museums. At the Anzio Beachhead Museum we sat in on a lecture by the President of the museum to an Italian school party with their teacher translating for us. At the end Greg, through their teacher, thanked the children for their interest and understanding of what happened on the Gustav line and at Anzio all those years ago. We also visited the Piana delle Orme Museo, an Agricultural & War Museum, probably Italy’s largest, with a very impressive display of original military equipment (after WW2 the US and Canadians left much of their kit behind) presented in exhibitions of the battlefields of El Alamein, Cassino, Anzio and a very heart stopping and thought provoking mock up of the destruction of Monte Cassino.

Returning to what happened to our father Dick. On being badly wounded, he was taken in the dark by ambulance to a Main Dressing Station, where they did as much as they could to save his life. Dick took shrapnel ripping right across his stomach, up his arm including the loss of two fingers and a thumb. At the time Dad had a map of the beachhead in his pocket and today Toby still has that map, bloodstains and all. He was later transferred to a General Hospital in Naples. It was now March 1944 and Dick witnessed, from his hospital bed, the eruption of Vesuvius. Not very long after he was lucky to escape a second Luftwaffe action, as the ward on the top floor above him was hit. At the end of that month he returned by hospital ship to England. It was a long journey home via the Suez Canal and Cape of South Africa as it was too dangerous to return via Gibraltar.

After a year’s convalescence Dick returned to the Chichester Town Council in Sussex where he continued his career in local government, gaining his accountancy qualifications. He married Dorothy (Dolly) in 1952 and they had three children, Sheila, Timothy and Toby. By retirement he had become Treasurer of Tandridge District Council in Surrey. Dick died in 1997, two years after his beloved Dolly.

It took four battles at Cassino, with the loss of many thousands of men from ten or more different countries and the destruction of a beautiful abbey for the Allies to breakthrough the Gustav line and meet up with those stuck on the Anzio beachhead and begin the advance resulting in the liberation of Rome on the 4th of June.

For the 57th, in fact for all the British forces, it was not for them the glory of marching into Rome. Lt. General Mark Clark, in charge of the US forces, had ensured that this honour was for him and his US troops alone. Clark had gone back on General Sir Harold Alexander’s plan to challenge as many of the retreating German troops before marching on to Rome. The 57th stayed on in Italy right up to the final battle in April 1945 and beyond.

Our final day was in Naples and we had to include a visit to Vesuvius. We had both learnt a lot from our trip. If Dad had not been wounded and had therefore gone on to be part of Operation Fischfang, Toby and I and our sister Sheila might not have ever existed. We also found out that the great Italian people suffered terribly during this whole period and that those Allied soldiers who served in Italy were all but forgotten at home as D-Day soon overshadowed their immense bravery. Dad always said the landings in Sicily, Salerno and Anzio were the dress rehearsals for D-Day. In England at the time there was some feeling that the troops in Italy were sunning themselves and drinking red wine among the orange and lemon groves and that they were ‘D-Day Dodgers’. Nothing could be further from the truth.

© Copyright Tim Cooper