Monte Cassino - Gary Lineker BBC Documentary: My Grandad's War

Hello,

This may be old news to some people as it was first aired in November 2019, but if you haven't seen it, I would recommend that you watch a BBC documentary by the footballer, Gary Lineker, called My Grandad's War, in which he retraces the footsteps of his maternal grandfather, Stanley Abbs, who served in Italy at the time of the Monte Cassino conflict, a brutal battle which lasted five months, and ended just before the D-Day Landings on 6th June, 1944.

In it, Gary talks to two veterans who also served at Monte Cassino, and had made the journey to Italy to meet with him - William Earl, then aged 104, and Fred Mason aged 95, both of whom had amazing and fascinating stories to tell, two wonderful characters. Monte Cassino has been much less widely documented than the higher profile D-Day Landings, yet it had around 55,000 Allied troops fatalities over its duration.

It was good to hear more about an aspect of WW2 that had not been widely documented or publicised.