So much to remember, so easy to forget. So it is not surprising that, amid our winter woes and worries, virtually no one has paused to reflect on what happened in Italy 65 winters ago, a time of perhaps the fiercest fighting of World War II, a time when intelligence and conscience collided, a time when the assumptions of the military led to the destruction of a monastery, a time of heroic combat and savage loss of life.

A generation ago, no American would have to be told that we were speaking of the Battle of Monte Cassino, an important and in many ways tragic milestone on the road to Rome and to victory in World War II. But a nation that, since its 18th-century founding, has prided itself on building the future often shortchanges the past.

At the center of the battle was a great hulking monastery, which, founded by St. Benedict in A.D. 529 and used as the model for abbeys throughout Western Europe, was one of the most sacred sites of Christianity. With five courtyards, with the echoes of centuries of pilgrims’ footfalls and with one of the greatest repositories of Christian writing dating to antiquity, Monte Cassino was by any measure one of the cultural gems of what still might have been the world’s most powerful continent and what indisputably is one of the world’s great faiths.

Cultural icon or fortress

Everyone recognized the monastery for what it was: a cultural icon situated on what inevitably was described as one of the greatest defensive positions in all of Europe. The cradle of the Benedictine Order, it was, as David Hapgood and David Richardson put it in their 1984 account of the Cassino conflict, “a treasure literally without price.”

So much so that, months before the battle, Italian museum officials had alerted Allied officials of the treasures that rested within its walls, 20-feet thick at their base, and Lt. Gen. Mark Clark specifically called for great care to preserve the monastery. A month before the battle, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied supreme commander, sent a message to “all commanders” that said:

“Today we are fighting in a country which has contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments which by their creation helped and now in their old age illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours. We are now bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows.”

But there was a caveat to Eisenhower’s entreaty. “If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men,” he said, “then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go.”

Eventually the Allies faced this choice, between saving men and saving a building built by men in celebration of their God. It was a difficult, wrenching debate, made all the more agonizing by persistent suspicions that the Nazis had converted an immense monastery into an impregnable fort — suspicions fueled by reports, never confirmed, that 30 machine guns were installed in the monastery, or that someone saw field glasses in an abbey window, or that shots were coming from the building.

Monastery ‘must be destroyed’

Finally a U.S. air wing intelligence analysis concluded that Monte Cassino had “accounted for the lives of upwards of 2,000 boys,” adding: “This monastery must be destroyed and everyone in it, as there is no one in it but Germans.”

And so the bombing proceeded — “swarms of bright pellets tumbled toward the abbey,” Rick Atkinson wrote in “The Day of Battle,” his masterly account of the war in Italy, “as if heaven itself were throwing silver stones.”

There were, as it turned out, no Germans in the abbey, though the destruction of the monastery by 250 bombers dropping 600 tons of high explosives and incendiaries provided the Germans with a crude high position, militarily and morally, that they had not occupied before the bombing. No one knows how many were killed inside the abbey, though 148 skulls later were found, a figure that almost certainly does not account for the full toll of monks, pilgrims and visitors.

For the Americans who fought and survived the battles that preceded and followed the abbey bombing, the war was not over. There was still the passage to Rome, still the capture of the Eternal City, still a year more of a conflict that itself seemed eternal.

For the sake of those who fought and died, this story cannot be forgotten. “Blasted to oblivion before their time, they would not want to be thought of as heroes; and to be truthful, they were not,” wrote Harold L. Bond, who fought at Cassino and wrote an affecting memoir about the battle. “They were simply young men caught in the grim web of modern history, and they deserved to be remembered as men who, when the time came, did what was asked of them.”

Harry Bond went on to teach Gibbon and the King James Version of the Bible to a generation of Dartmouth students, myself happily and gratefully among them. It is not too much to say that Professor Bond was as marked by Cassino as his students were marked by him.

There is more to this story, more than what Professor Bond, who died in 1986, could have known in his own youth.

An unsettling look back

The bombing produced no military advantage. Even so, British Gen. Henry Maitland Wilson, who had seen action in the Boer War, claimed shortly after the aerial barrage that there had been “irrefutable evidence that the Cassino Abbey was part of the main German defensive line.”

That conclusion remained the narrative for more than a dozen years, though cracks in the story slowly became evident. By 1969 — 40 years ago and a quarter-century after the battle — the Army concluded that “the abbey was actually unoccupied by German troops.”

This story of Monte Cassino, this mixture of heroism and history, of tragic loss and tragic miscalculation, has echoes and lessons for our own time and our own wars. It reminds us that intelligence is fallible, that human judgment is flawed, that history has its own great reckoning, and that in our search for truth and honor we err if we do not acknowledge all that we do not know, even as we heed what little we do.