Driving The Gustav Line From Sea To Sea In Italy
Travellers Will Feel Shock & Awe Touring The WWII Defensive Line
Jan 31, 2009
Approximately 65 years ago Allied troops punched through the main German defensive fortifications known as the Gustav Line. It ran about 120 km. south of Rome from west to east through extremely rugged and mountainous geography. Driving along its pleasant route today, it's hard to imagine the horrors that WWII veterans experienced.
The Gustav Line crossed Italy more or less from Terracino to Ortona. It can take a leisurely week to drive approximately 450 km. with stops that include L'Aquila, Sulmona and Atri in the Apennines, but for the soldiers the route took a lifetime.
Gaeta to Monte Cassino
The sweeping beaches of the Golfo di Gaeta belie the harshness that the Gustav Line was. The emperor Tiberius built a graceful resort at Sperlonga but inland on the road over Monti Aurunci to the Liri Valley, the Germans built fortifications of concrete bunkers, steel-topped gunneries and deadly mines to protect the route to Rome. A 10 km. side trip to Pontecorvo marks the place where Canadian troops broke through the defenses in May, 1944. Historian Terry Copp wrote in Legion Magazine, (March 7, 2007) that the battle was no soft place and "it was the costliest single day for any Canadian brigade in the Italian Campaign." But Monte Cassino was harder.
Monte Cassino to Ortona
The Monte Cassino monastery ominously looms over the town and several memorial cemeteries. In 1944 it was reduced to rubble since the Allies could not bypass the site that controlled the valley. From the Polish Cemetery just below its walls, there are panoramic vistas and the daunting steep climbs attest to the courage needed to take the 6th century shrine. Motor coaches still bring several nationalities, Poles, British and New Zealanders among them, to wander the cemeteries, leaving behind mementoes and gratitude.
There are two options when leaving Cassino:
- take the windy and picturesque roads through the Parco Nazionale d'Abruzzo and hill-top villages like Opi and Scanno
- or the faster way through Avezzano to Chieti via the technological feat of the Tiburtina motorway.
Ortona to L'Aquila
The Moro River valley from Guardiagrele to Ortona was a flooded, muddy, steep-sided valley that December 1943, the bloodiest month for Canadian troops in WWII. One can still see walls pockmarked from bullets among the olive groves and vineyards, such as Casa Berardi which honours Capt. Paul Triquet and the Van Doos. Time passes though and the town that was totally destroyed then and gave the term "mouse holing" for urban combat is now a modern seaside resort. In fact the church Chiesa Santa Maria di Constantinopli on Don Bosco St., where Canadians had their Christmas Eve meal before returning to the fighting, is now a private residence.
Driving north from Ortona one leaves the Gustav Line but finds evidence of WW II still. The Resistance worked to harass Nazi troops behing the line. In Atri, an attractive hill town of 11,000 people with a 13th century Duomo, there is a small piazza and monument to Francesco Martella, a resistance fighter, "assassinated by nazi fascists" on Nov. 17, 1943. And in L'Aquila, the capital of Abruzzo, there is
- a plaque on the Porta Bazzano, the medieval entrance to the steep-stepped Jewish sector that commemorates that the city was freed on June 13, 1944, one week later than Rome
- a monument to resistance fighters in the Piazza IX Martiri.
This drive from the west to the east picks its way among remnants of the Gustav Line which can be an act of remembrance to those WWII soldiers as well as a marvelous slice of Italy.
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