WWII veteran wants people to remember Monte Cassino

Penn Hills man fought in bloody 1944 battle

Pearl Harbor. Midway. D-Day. The Battle of the Bulge. Iwo Jima.

The epic battles of World War II still resonate 70 years later.

Yet one of the costliest U.S. campaigns is barely remembered: The war in Italy and the desperate fight at Monte Cassino.

“You never hear anything about it,” says Albert DeFazio. “It just boggles my mind. That’s why I’m [ticked] off.”

Mr. DeFazio is 92 and lives in Penn Hills.

He has two scars on his back, shrapnel wounds he suffered from a German shell burst at Monte Cassino in January 1944. He earned the Bronze Star and came home suffering from shell shock after fighting on the way to Rome. He says he still has symptoms of what is now called posttraumatic stress disorder.

For years after the war, he rarely talked about his experiences in Italy. It’s a typical pattern among World War II veterans. His late brother Pat was shot in the neck at the Battle of the Bulge. The two brothers went home to live in the same house in Penn Hills, yet they never once talked to each other about what happened to them in the war.

“Never spoke a word,” Mr. DeFazio says.

But Mr. DeFazio is talking now.

Because for him, the struggle at Cassino is something Americans should not forget.

About 114,000 soldiers were killed or wounded in Italy, many of them during attempts to penetrate the fortified Gustav Line blocking the allied advance up the Italian boot.

The western anchor of the line was dominated by Monte Cassino and its mountaintop Roman Catholic abbey, built in 529.

Although the Germans did not