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This story was submitted to the People's War site by a volunteer from Northumberland on behalf of John P. (J. P.) Elliott. Mr. Elliott fully understands the site's terms and conditions, and the story has been added to the site with his permission.

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J.P. Elliott served with the 2nd Battalion, Coldstream Guards at Cassino during the actions in the first half of 1944 to secure the town and the heights of Monte Cassino overlooking it. For a time, a unit of the Scots Guards supported his battalion, whose duties included carrying supplies to the front line.

J.P. well remembers the difficulties encountered by the carrying parties, including having to endure a fusillade of all kinds of shells and fixed lines of machine gun fire, not only as they walked the "Mad Mile" but, also, in Cassino itself. The Coldstream Guards were supplied with food, ammunition and water, as well as fly papers to rid the men of clouds of vicious biting flies, and lime to cover excrement and, in some cases, the dead. Sandbags were used to carry all such provisions.

The following is a condensed account taken from J.P.'s unpublished war memoirs of his section's entry into Cassino. That entry started when his section moved through a hole in the wall of a civilian graveyard, in darkness such that the men kept stumbling over fallen headstones before they arrived at the beginning of the "Mad Mile", also known as Via Catalino and Highway Six.

No matter how quickly that mile was walked, the traveller, at some stage, came under a barrage of shells. The enemy also used the dreadful six-barrelled mortar. The noise of it being electrically fired sounded like the screaming of all the tortured souls in hell. Wrecked tanks, ambulances and transports of many kinds lay at all angles, the ground on both sides of the road being a huge area of murdered earth. After a frightening journey, J.P.'s section arrived at Battalion Headquarters, situated in a crypt in the suburbs of Cassino. There, guides were met who were to take them to relieve forward positions held by the Black Watch Regiment near the foot of the awesome Monte Cassino.

During the hours of darkness, smoke shells were fired into the town, to cover any movement. Those shells exploded in the air, scattering small smoke canisters over a wide area, which created an added hazard, wounding porters and defenders. The smoke became so dense it restricted any movement, as well as d***ed near choking all who stayed in it. As they followed the guides, the men scrambled over heaps of rubble, house timbers, and shell and bomb craters. The smoke gave them a ghostly appearance as the leading figures in their file disappeared into it.

At last, they reached an open stretch of ground where the guides halted the section. Two Guardsmen were directed to a hole in the ground that was just big enough to accommodate them. The guides then pointed to a low wall about twenty yards away, informing J.P. that that was his position along with the remaining four Guardsmen. In the mad dash to the wall, bullets whistled so close that J.P. felt sure he and his colleagues would not get there but they crashed against the wall gasping for breath, as the guides informed him of the do's and don'ts before they quickly disappeared into a wall of smoke.

After a sleepless night of being constantly shelled and machine gunned, dawn revealed the precarious position the section had to hold. The wall, four feet high by fourteen feet long, had no overhead cover. The men sat with their backs to the enemy, "It was like trying to fly an aeroplane when facing its tail." During the hours of daylight, the men sat with their knees drawn up to their chins, fearing that being stretched out they could be seen by the enemy on the slopes of Monte Cassino. The toilet they used was a steel helmet with the inside harness removed. They performed Charlie Chaplin contortions when using it and, often, they were rudely interrupted by enemy shelling when doing so.

For five days and nights they sat there, enduring all that the enemy could sling at them. They not only swallowed large amounts of white dust, they were also covered in it. During bombardments, the men bounced on their bottoms to a concerto of echoing and re-echoing explosions, being showered by debris of all kinds. To each of them, every minute seemed like an hour, every hour a day, and every day a week, without their realising that they had another seven days to spend in an equally terrifying position. The only visitors were the nightly porters, and how they looked forward to seeing them, if only briefly.

To cap all J.P.'s misery, he had the unpleasant task of burying a twenty-three year old friend beneath a farmhouse window, just off the "Mad Mile". That friend now rests in Cassino War Cemetery, as do many other of J.P.'s colleagues.

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