Fifteen Northland rangatahi flew to Italy yesterday to join commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the end of the battle of Cassino.
Pita Tipene from Ngāti Hine says the group from the Leadership Academy, A Company at Te Kāpehu Whetū in Whāngarei, will also visit other sites in Greece andCrete where the 28 Maori Battalion fought.
The battalion lost more than 150 men in its first assault on the town, which was strategically placed on the way to Rome, and the New Zealand total at the end of the two-month battle was 343 deaths and over 600 wounded.
Ngati Hine leader Pita Tipene points to a photograph of his late father Solomon Tipene on the wall inside the Te Rau Aroha Museum at Waitangi. Tipene leaves next week to visit Italy, Greece and Crete, where his father fought with the Māori Battalion and was captured there, then spending time in a POW camp
Tipene says it was some of the most bloody fighting of the Italian campaign.
“The Germans despite being on the back foot, they were being pushed up the Italian peninsula, they were then fighting for their own country,” he says.
Of all the battles involving the Māori Battalion in World War II, none was more brutal or costly than the struggle for Cassino in early 1944.
The towering 500m Monte Cassino, topped by a Benedictine monastery, dominated the route to Rome through the Liri Valley. Below it lay the Rapido River and the heavily defended town of Cassino. Several Allied attacks had failed before the New Zealanders arrived.
The Māori Battalion A and B Companies suffered terrible losses, with 128 out of 200 men killed, wounded or captured.
After another unsuccessful attack in March, which saw desperate close-range fighting in the ruins of the town, the New Zealanders were withdrawn in early April. Cassino eventually fell to Polish troops in mid-May 1944.
