of the New Zealand Corps under Lieutenant General Mark Clark's U.S. Fifth Army. The Fifth Army had already made two unsuccessful attempts to break the Winter Line at Cassino and it was planned for 78th Division to exploit the planned breakthrough by the 2nd New Zealand and 4th Indian Infantry Divisions during the third battle. The attempt failed and the East Surrey's role was restricted to patrolling its sector of front on the Rapido river. At the end of March the East Surreys were moved into the mountains behind Cassino to relieve the badly mauled Indians. The location was once again cold and bleak and overlooked by German positions, making movement in daylight impossible. The ground was hard and rocky so that only shallow trenches could be dug with loose stone surrounds providing scant protection. After a month the battalion was relieved by Polish units for a short rest period, followed by intense training for the fourth Battle of Monte Cassino. After the Allied breakthrough in Operation Diadem the division took part in the advance up the Liri valley continuing to fight northwards from Rome towards Arezzo. After heavy fighting at the Trasimene Line, another German defensive line, the division was taken out of the line in July 1944 for rest in Egypt. Early in October 1944, the battalion, in which Saunders was now a major commanding a rifle company, returned with the 78th Division to Italy and traveled by transport on a circuitous route from Taranto that took them through Assisi, Perugia and Arezzo to San Apollinare in the Tuscan Apennine mountains north of Florence. It was a grim, mountainous area with narrow, winding tracks, pitted with shell holes which turned to slippery mud in the heavy rain. The task of the 78th Division was, as part of Lieutenant-General Sidney C. Kirkman's British XIII Corps (which at this time formed the right wing of Mark Clark's U.S. Fifth Army), to join in the offensive to break through the mountains to the Lombardy plain. The battalion's role was to capture two objectives, Monte La Pieve and Monte Spaduro, which blocked the advance. On the night of 15 October, the 1st Surrey's attack on Monte Pieve was only partly successful, but an attack in brigade strength two days later ended in anti-climax when the enemy was found to have gone. Monte Spaduro, a massive, razor-backed ridge running from south to north