After years of having Cassino sit on my shelf, I finally pulled it out and played a scenario. Some years back I designed a yet-to-be-published scenario on the day after this assault across the Rapido River when the Germans mopped up the forlorn US remnants. I am reading "Cassino Portrait of a battle by Fred Majdalany, and I just finished the chapter on the Rapido assault. So, I pulled out Cassino and noticed the first two scenarios cover this sordid affair and they are not big scenarios. Night assaults, through mines and crossing a river in flimsy boats against angry Germans, sounds like fun.

The Germans set up with the Strongpoints and 75mm ATG covering the center and the infantry on both ends, ready to move to the fight.

The US chose to assault in two hexes just east of Sant Angelo, hopefully getting across quickly with enough power to deal with the few German units in the area before the rest converge on the fight.

Right off the bat the German artillery disrupted on of the US engineers that took most of the game to recover. On the west end of the assault area, the units to cross got disrupted or demoralized by mortar fire. But soon about a company sized element got across and even made it to the road. But the ability to recover and get units across was too sporadic and the US could never build up enough combat power. But at one time about turn 7 or 8, the US was starting to cause enough casualties with their artillery that they might be able to pull off a draw. But the Germans continued to pound them, and the US ended up with only a half infantry platoon, a leader and an HMG platoon across. Both sides took heavy casualties. This was ugly but was a lot of fun and kept some tension for a bit. And it was very historical.