In Washington state, a patrol of twenty-five men from the 41st Division spent the winter at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp outside Rainier National Park under the guidance of Sgt. Karl Hindeman, a ski instructor from Montana.
Another northwestern outfit from the 3rd Division trained under former University of Oregon ski coach Paul Lafferty. Eighteen officers and men bunked together in a converted garage at Longmire, a National Park Service camp on the south slope of Mount Rainier. At the end of their winter’s training, Lafferty led the men on a two-week circumnavigation of Rainier’s massive, dormant cone, crossing along the way many of the twenty-six glaciers that creep down its flanks. As they went, they tested a hodgepodge of civilian ski and winter camping gear—there being no standard military issue at the time—and what passed then for lightweight camping food: dehydrated cereals, dried potatoes, chipped beef, powdered eggs, spaghetti.
The 41st Division ski patrol undertook a graduation exercise of sorts too, skiing across Washington’s Olympic Mountains in four days, west to east, under the leadership of Lt. John Woodward, a former University of Washington ski team captain. “I didn’t have the rank,” says Woodward sheepishly now, “but there was so little mountaineering experience, they said, ‘John, you’re in charge.’ ”
Woodward’s trek across the Olympics confirmed what top skiers at the time already knew, that skis with metal edges far outperformed edgeless models. Soldiers on the edgeless skis reported great frustration as rounded wooden edges slipped out from beneath them on slopes of wind-hardened or icy snow.
These first limited cadres did learn to ski. And they reported their findings regarding improvised training methods and equipment, but the Army clearly had a long way to go toward understanding the needs of a mountain division.
Indeed, the military still wasn’t convinced it wanted a mountain division. Winter over, the Army deemed the ski patrol experiments a success and disbanded them in the spring of 1941. Minnie Dole despaired. The patrols had not led to a permanent force as he had hoped; specialized units remained in disfavor within the Army hierarchy. Why not, some in the War Department argued, just move flatland units up to the mountains for short periods of training? Or adapt existing infantry divisions to operations in different kinds of terrain? Minnie believed that neither of these options would be adequate for defending Alaska, say, or for fighting in the Appalachian Mountains for that matter, when the real cold and snow set in. He got back on his typewriter and agitated for the creation, at the very least, of a small permanent test force that could be the nucleus of some future division. But the matter languished in Washington for the better part of the summer.
Meanwhile, Minnie and his team continued working outside the official purview of the War Department. They formed the Volunteer Winter Defense Committee of the National Ski Association and set to work answering the reams of questions posed by the ski patrol “experiments.” Their equipment committee was chaired by Bestor Robinson, the California mountaineer, and included Monsen from Lake Placid, Dole, Langley, Alfred Lindley, who had climbed Mount McKinley on skis, Douglas Burkett of the Appalachian Mountain Club, and a well-known Alaskan explorer from the American Geophysical Society named Walter Wood.
They faced a huge job. Most of the gear available in 1941 was suited to the burgeoning mass of “practice-slope skiers” in America, few of whom ventured off-trail. Mountaineering and snow-camping gear, what little there was, came primarily from Europe. The only lightweight camp stoves, for instance, which were essential for melting snow for drinking and cooking, had to be imported from Sweden.
The committee’s first step was to round up all of the foreign manuals on winter warfare that members could find, translate them, and learn what they could. What they discovered was that not much applied to the American landscape. (They were still thinking in terms of defending against invasion.) European and Scandinavian mountain troops could often count on existing alpine huts, farms, and villages for shelter. And the Swiss were practiced at hollowing out caves in their glaciers to house and protect large numbers of soldiers. But America’s high country was largely uninhabited wilderness. And there were no glaciers in New England or indeed along most of the northern frontier. Americans would have to develop their own portable mountain tents.
The committee learned that the Finns transported heavy equipment, including artillery, by horse-drawn sleigh along their frozen roadways. But Finland is mostly flat, and this technique wasn’t likely to work in the powdery snow and roadless expanses of North America. They read reports on Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, but these were dependent on dog teams and motor tractors for transport. The committee figured there weren’t enough sled dogs on the planet to support an army division, and they knew that no over-snow vehicle then in existence could get up steep pitches or through deep, soft snow.
The one manual that did provide real guidance was the Sierra Club’s Manual of Ski Mountaineering, edited by David Brower, a twenty-nine-year-old Berkeley, California native. Written as a series of articles by club members, it offered sound advice on everything from avalanche awareness to putting together a lightweight kit of backcountry essentials. In the equipment chapter, Bestor Robinson, a club member, a lawyer, and a stickler for detail, even suggested drilling holes in your toothbrush to save an ounce or two. Climbers are notorious gear freaks, and Robinson, a pioneer of vertical climbing in Yosemite Valley in the 1930s, knew better than most the value of worrying his gear to perfection.
In April 1941, Robinson and Paul Lafferty (of the 3rd Division ski patrol) and about twenty other experienced skiers, including David Brower, set off into the still-snowy backcountry of the eastern Sierra Nevadas. They camped in Little Lakes Valley at 10,000 feet elevation, just beneath the jagged granite crest of the range. They carried with them every piece of mountain gear they believed might work for the Army, all of it from civilian suppliers: skis from Northland and Anderson & Thompson, boots by the Bass Company and L.L. Bean, sleeping bags and tents from Abercrombie & Fitch, winter clothing from Montgomery Ward and Marshall Field. They tested gasoline stoves and different ski waxes. Snowshoes, repair kits, rucksacks, pack boards, pitons, snap rings, climbing ropes, knit caps, knives, sun screens, mess kits, mittens, goggles, gaiters, wool pants, poplin pants, poplin parkas, and caribou-hide parkas.
Robinson, who had joined the staff of the Quartermaster General, took the results to Washington, where specifications for GI gear began to take shape. But the Army still didn’t seem any closer, despite the testing and Minnie Dole’s furious letter writing, to creating a real mountain force.
Then in August, proponents of a mountain division got a boost from the U.S. military attaché to Italy. The war had expanded into southern and eastern Europe. While Hitler’s Panzers drove into the Soviet Union, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini decided, as part of his “parallel war” strategy, to invade Italy’s ancient enemy, Greece, through the mountains of Albania. The attaché’s report described an Italian army ill-equipped for cold. When the Greeks counterattacked and the Italians were forced to retreat back into the mountains, an estimated ten thousand of them froze to death. Twenty-five thousand were killed in mountain fighting, and many thousands more were taken prisoner. The blow to Italian morale and prestige turned out to be irreparable.
In a memorandum on the Italian fiasco, Lt. Col. L. S. Gerow of the General Staff Corps wrote: “Important lesson learned: an army which may have to fight anywhere in the world must have . . . units especially organized, trained, and equipped for fighting in the mountains and in winter . . . such units cannot be improvised hurriedly from line divisions. They require long periods of hardening and experience, for which there is no substitute for time.”
Minnie Dole couldn’t have asked for a better testimonial, and on October 22, 1941, he received letters from Secretary of War Stimson and General Marshall stating that on November 15, 1941, the 1st Battalion (Reinforced) 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment would be activated at Fort Lewis, Washington. The firs
t element of what would become the 10th Mountain Division was officially launched. Whether it had come about because of Minnie’s tireless advocacy or because of the experiences of allies and enemies in winter settings was not ultimately important. On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the first recruit arrived in Washington. His was a profile that would come to characterize, fairly or unfairly, the “elite” nature of the new division. He was Charles McLane of Manchester, New Hampshire, a Dartmouth racer from a well-known skiing family. He carried his own rucksack and his own skis, and he stood in the Puget Sound drizzle in his green Dartmouth sweater with the white D on it. He told the duty officer that he was there to report for the ski troops. To which the officer replied: “Corporal, as far as I can figure out, you are the ski troops.”
The mountain troops truly had arrived when the February 21, 1942, issue of The New Yorker magazine ran a “Notes and Comment” piece entitled “Minnie’s Ski Troops.” The story summarized Dole’s twenty-month effort to establish a cold-weather, high-altitude division and ended with this: “Minnie is gratified with results, but he thinks this winter’s Russian campaign would have sold the idea anyhow.”
Once again, the newsreels showed a mighty army stopped in its tracks by snow and cold. This time it was the German army on the eastern front, caught short of Moscow and freezing to death by the thousands in summer boots and light jackets.
CHAPTER 2:
Paradise
As the first would-be ski troops arrived at Fort Lewis early in the winter of 1941–42, there was more to feel gloomy about than the coastal Washington weather. The war in Europe and the Far East, with few exceptions, was going the Axis way. For a full year, from June 1940 to June 1941, Great Britain battled Germany alone. Had it not been for the miraculous evacuation at Dunkirk, where 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian soldiers escaped in a motley seven-hundred-ship armada across the English Channel, there might not have been any Allied powers for the United States to join. But after Dunkirk, Hitler’s planned invasion of the British Isles, code-named “Operation Sea Lion,” had to be postponed until the Luftwaffe, the German air force, gained control of the skies over the Channel.
The Royal Air Force, in what came to be known as the Battle of Britain, made sure that never happened. Throughout the summer of 1940, wave after wave of German bombers and their fighter escorts were intercepted by RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes. The British fighters turned out to be more maneuverable and their pilots more focused than the tactically disorganized Germans. By mid-September the RAF knew it could shoot down Luftwaffe bombers faster than German industry could produce new ones. In frustration, Hitler ordered the night-bombing of major English cities. But “the Blitz” only served to steel English resolve, and by late winter 1941, the bombing campaign had withered. Hitler put off Sea Lion indefinitely and turned his attention to Lebensraum and the Soviet heartland.
Meanwhile, Italy had joined with Germany and had declared war on both France and Britain (but not until it was clear France had fallen before the German blitzkrieg). Though Mussolini had once thought of the younger Adolf Hitler as his protégé, Hitler had nothing but disdain for Il Duce and his undisciplined military. Back in March 1940, Hitler had told Mussolini that Germany didn’t need Italy’s help to win the war, but that Italy would be allowed to participate and thus escape second-rate status in the Mediterranean. On returning to Rome, Mussolini decided that Italy would fight its own “parallel war” to forge “a new Roman Empire.” Soon thereafter came the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Greeks in the mountains of Albania and ill-conceived adventures in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), Kenya, and Sudan.
On the eastern front, Hitler reneged on his nonaggression pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. As they had in the west, his Panzer divisions streaked across the Russian steppes, outflanking and surrounding whole Soviet armies with lightning pincer movements. But October and November brought early and bitter cold snaps, and winter snows immobilized the underdressed Germans within sight of Moscow.
In the Pacific, Japan’s expansion would soon reach its zenith with the fall of Hong Kong, French Indochina (Vietnam), Malaya, Sumatra, Burma, Borneo, Java, Wake, and Guam. On January 9, 1942, U.S. troops on the Bataan peninsula surrendered, effectively turning the Philippines over to the Japanese as well. Japanese strategists had taken full advantage of Britain’s desperate home defense and of the inability of the United States to fight back following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. But that event, far from demoralizing the Americans, as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese fleet, had hoped, served to galvanize the United States for war. Already committed to being “the arsenal of democracy,” in FDR’s phrase, the United States was now on track to fight and win wherever necessary. The creation of the 87th Mountain Regiment was one small piece in the jigsaw puzzle of a massive war effort.
The Army could hardly have picked a better location for the fledgling mountain regiment. The soldiers felt no affection for Fort (Meriwether) Lewis itself, just outside Tacoma, but the presence nearby of Mount Rainier made up in spades for Lewis’s coastal fog and mud.
On clear days, Rainier’s volcanic dome towers over the lowlands of Puget Sound—an American Fuji with a perpetual, ice-cream cone summit. At 14,410 feet it is the highest peak in the Cascade Range and fifth highest in the Lower 48 (after California’s Mount Whitney and three summits in Colorado). Its twenty-six glaciers pour down all sides of the mountain into dense stands of conifer, summer meadows full of wildflowers, waterfalls, and trout streams. The entire massif was set aside as a national park in 1899. And since 1870, when the mountain was first climbed, Rainier has been the signature challenge for northwestern mountaineers. It is so big, and so close to the ocean, that it makes its own weather; snowstorms wrap the summit any month of the year. Climbers die every year attempting the summit. They freeze to death in sudden squalls or fall into hidden crevasses. The mountaineers in the 87th knew this was a serious peak and eagerly claimed Rainier as home.
Beginning in the mid 1930s, there was organized skiing on Rainier too, on its lower slopes, where seasonal snow depths of twenty feet were common. Once the road was plowed following a storm, weekenders from Seattle and Tacoma flocked to the rope tows at two National Park Service lodges at Longmire and Paradise. A smooth-skiing émigré from Salzburg named Otto Lang had started the first official Arlberg ski school in the western United States at Paradise in 1936. The slopes were good enough to host the 1935 National Championships. Minnie Dole’s friends, Robert Livermore, Jr., and Alex Bright, earned their spots on the 1936 Olympic team in those races on the “Silver Skis” course.
When the snow began to fly that first winter of 1941–42, the 87th’s commanding officer, Col. Onslow S. Rolfe, negotiated a deal with the National Park Service to lease Paradise Lodge through May. These were luxury digs by Army standards and a big-mountain fantasy for those recruits who had been skiers at home in the East and Midwest. A twenty-eight-year-old enlisted man from Wisconsin named Charles Bradley described it thus in his book Aleutian Echoes: “The 87th was rolled up and transported by bus to Paradise . . . where the well-plowed roads lay in snow canyons deeper than the buses and where my quarters on the first floor of the lodge required me to climb to the third floor to step out of doors. Paradise? Right on! A place to study war? Too weird to think about.”
Colonel Rolfe knew about war, but he admittedly didn’t know much about skiing or surviving in the mountains. He was a West Point graduate and had been a decorated cavalryman in World War I, but the only reason he could figure he’d been assigned the job at Rainier was that he was a native of New Hampshire and someone back at the War Department must have assumed that meant he was a skier.
He wasn’t a skier, but he learned fast. Pinkie, as he was known to the men, took instruction from some of the best in world, because, as the companies of the first battalion filled up—A Company, then B Company, and so on—the roster at P
aradise became a kind of who’s who of American skiing.
Some joined the Army specifically to be a part of the 87th; others, already in the service, transferred to the ski troops from their old outfits. Robert Livermore, Jr., signed up, as did a young racing sensation out of the University of New Hampshire named Steve Knowlton. Lt. John Jay, namesake and direct descendant of the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, transferred in from the Army Signal Corps. He was a budding ski filmmaker. Dev Jennings was a Utah mountain climber and ski racer. And Nelson Bennett and Tap Tapley left skiing jobs at the resort in Sun Valley to join the troops at Paradise. More than a few veterans of the Army “ski patrols” met them there, including Capt. Paul Lafferty and Lt. John Woodward.
A significant number of the men who signed up were not Americans but the great European skiers who had left the old country to seek their fortunes on this side of the pond. The most famous name of all was that of Torger Tokle, a ski jumper from Norway who had been in the United States only since 1939. At this time, downhill racing was too new to have much of a following, but ski jumping was enormously popular, one of the biggest spectator sports of the day. And Tokle had no equal on the barnstorming professional tour. Thousands came out to watch the jumpers at each stop, from Madison Square Garden to the Los Angeles Coliseum, where tons of crushed ice had to be hauled in to coat the in-run and landing zone. A newspaper photo of a jump constructed at the Los Angeles County Fair in the 1930s shows a tremendous, curving scaffold with a thin ribbon of ice down its middle while palm trees wave in a cloudless Southern California sky. The jumping tour had its roots in winter and mountains and genuine competition, but it also had its circus side and competed with horse racing and baseball for the biggest crowds on some weekends.
The jumpers were called “birdmen.” And they did fly: crouching at sixty miles an hour on the in-run, skis clattering in the icy grooves, then bursting off the lip, legs together, body leaning out into the wind, chin nearly reaching the ski tips, arms pinwheeling for balance until, at the last second, the legs split into a telemark landing and a final skid to a stop. It all seemed too incredible, each succeeding jumper outdoing the last, riding the air on their “Norwegian snowshoes.”
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