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The Italian campaign played second fiddle to the D-Day landings but it was a brutal war. Key to the liberation of the 'soft underbelly' of Hitler's Europe - as Churchill called it - was the Catholic monastery of Monte Cassino high up on a rocky hill, which was a key Nazi stronghold in the way of the road to Rome. Matt Mackinnon-Pattison remembers how the beautiful Italian countryside turned into a bloody killing field. Getty Images.