The world's most glorious monastery, at Monte Cassino in Italy, was destroyed during the second world war because of a mistake by a British junior officer, according to new evidence in a book due out this week.
The officer - translating an intercepted radio message - mistook the German word for abbot for a similar word meaning battalion. His version convinced his superiors this meant a German military unit was using the monastery as its command post, in breach of a Vatican agreement which treated it as neutral.
Allied generals ordered a huge bombing attack. Only when the planes were in the air did a British intelligence officer, Colonel David Hunt, recheck the full radio intercept. He found that what it actually said was: "The abbot is with the monks in the monastery".
"Tragically, this was discovered too late," the book says. "The bombers were already approaching."
Monte Cassino - founded in 526 by St Benedict, numbering St Thomas Aquinas among its early monks - was blitzed in what is mourned as probably the greatest single aesthetic disaster of the war. Some 250 men, women and children died.
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