" Western Allied commanders didn’t want to destroy the abbey. Only weeks earlier, in one of his last acts before leaving Italy, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had issued an executive order stating that important artistic and historical sites were not to be bombed. Monte Cassino, one of the great achievements of early Italian and Christian culture, was clearly a protected site. Eisenhower’s order had provided exceptions. “If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men,” he wrote, “then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go.”2 But he had also drawn a line between military necessity and military convenience, and no commander wanted to be the first to test that line. "

― Robert M. Edsel , The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History