Roderick Macdonald’s final despatch from the battlefields of southern Italy relayed the monumental news on the front pages of newspapers across Australia on May 19, 1944. “The grimmest of all battles that has been fought in this Italian campaign is ending this morning,” Macdonald told his readers. “Cassino, fought for and defended for weary months with unparalleled bitterness, is isolated.
” That morning, just two days short of his 32nd birthday, the Sydney Morning Herald correspondent was moving with Britain’s advancing Eighth Army forces when his jeep came under German artillery fire. Macdonald and his travelling companion, British journalist Cyril Bewley of Kemsley newspapers, sought shelter in a field and stepped on a mine. They were both killed instantly.
At a well-tended war cemetery 140 kilometres south-east of Rome on Sunday, where Macdonald is buried alongside 12 Royal Australian Air Force servicemen, the correspondent’s bravery at the front line, which saw some of the fiercest fighting of the Italian campaign, was remembered. Marking the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Monte Cassino, where the Allied forces suffered 55,000 casualties during a bloody four-month campaign, was Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the head of the UK’s armed forces. Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh, laid a wreath where more than 4000 Commonwealth soldiers are buried.
Air Vice-Marshal Di Turton, Australia’s first female military representative to NATO and the European Union, read .