During the winter of 1942, on one of the big outdoor hills at Iron Springs, Michigan, Tokle set a world distance record of 289 feet. He didn’t look much like an athlete. He was only five feet seven inches and 160 pounds. But he had tremendous spring in his legs and an ability to hang in the air until the last possible moment before touching down. Humble and cheerful, he had worked as a carpenter before joining the Army, sending money home to family in Nazi-occupied Norway. Now he loved to amaze his fellow enlisted men with standing leaps onto flatbed trucks or over the supply room counter. Later, when the 10th was sent overseas, he would be the only ski trooper mentioned by name in newspaper stories from the front.
One of the first draftees to arrive on Rainier was Sgt. Walter Prager, a Swiss world champion who had most recently coached the Dartmouth College racing team. Dartmouth in the 1930s was the New York Yankees of collegiate skiing, and Prager was a legend on both sides of the Atlantic. He’d won the most important Alps ski race, the Arlberg-Kandahar, in St. Anton, Austria—twice—first in 1930 and again in 1933. At Dartmouth, he ran the most venerable, most successful program in the United States, attracting the best young skiers and dominating competition year after year. Four of the eight men on the 1936 Olympic team were Prager’s boys. His commanding officer at Fort Lewis, Lt. John Woodward, said, “With ten or fifteen of the world’s top skiers in the battalion, Walter Prager might have been the only man with the ability to keep all of the greats in line.”
Among the other greats there at Paradise were Austrians Friedl Pfeifer, who had emigrated before the Anschluss, and Toni Matt, who had managed to leave in 1939 after Germany’s political union with Austria. Matt was a brash young racer, a cherubic and barrel-chested junior champion at home who immediately seized a place in American skiing history by straight-lining the Inferno, an infamous annual dash down 4,200 vertical feet from the summit of New Hampshire’s wind-whipped Mount Washington. All the other skiers in the race, including defending champion (and Dartmouth hero) Dick Durrance, made turns on the super-steep Headwall to keep their speed in check. But Matt schussed it, knocked six minutes off the old record time, and, at age nineteen, created an instant legend.
Friedl Pfeifer was also a downhill champion, a world champion in fact, somewhat older than Matt and already established as one of the top instructors at Sun Valley. From its opening, Sun Valley epitomized skiing’s high end, its glittering romance. The resort’s founder, Averell Harriman, meant it to be that way. Diplomat, railroad magnate, future governor of New York, and avid skier, Harriman set out to recreate in the Idaho wilderness the grand resorts he’d skied in the Alps. As part of the plan, he invited most of Hollywood to the opening party, and he imported the best Austrian skiers to teach in his ski school. Friedl was one of the most celebrated, and with his dark hair slicked back and silk ascot peeking out of perfectly pressed white shirts, he fit right into the scene. Framed photographs in the hallways of the Sun Valley Lodge show Friedl leading the way for the likes of Gary Cooper and Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Errol Flynn, and Norma Shearer. It didn’t hurt that Friedl swooped across the snow low and fast in the Arlberg style, effortlessly, like a hawk.
But Pfeifer’s transition to the ski army was anything but smooth. On the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, FBI agents, who suspected some Sun Valley instructors of Nazi leanings, quickly arrested Friedl and a handful of other German-speakers, including the school’s director, Hans Hauser. Pfeifer felt he had been unjustly detained, but he did understand the panicked mindset that gripped his adopted nation. He told an interviewer in the film The Sun Valley Skiers, “Some rumor was that I was up on Galena Pass. I had a hidden radio station to, to communicate with the Nazis, well with Hitler. I was terribly shocked when they put some handcuffs on me at two o’clock in the morning and wouldn’t even let me go back to say goodbye to my wife and my little baby that was a year old.”
Jailed in Salt Lake City, the Austrians were given a choice: deportation home, where service with Axis armies was a near certainty; join the U.S. military and perhaps fight against friends and countrymen; or spend the rest of the war in jail. Hauser, who didn’t disguise his sympathy for Hitler, chose jail. Pfeifer, whose strong anti-Nazi feelings soon came out, joined the 87th Mountain Infantry Regiment as one of its top instructors.
Learning to ski the military way involved a change of approach for everyone, famous or not. Out went the fancy jump turns and fast christies, and in came a far less glamorous slogging, the practical moving of men and equipment across the snow for the purpose of doing battle. Day trips from Paradise Lodge grew longer and longer with gradually heavier loads. Muscles grew sinewy and hard. Faces bronzed in the high sun. Bradley recalled in Aleutian Echoes:
As time went on the loads increased to include overnight and cooking equipment, in addition to extra clothing, sleeping bags, matches, food, etc. Our backs and shoulders were toughening up, and we were learning some of the difficulties arising from barreling downhill with a heavy load riding on our backs that has its own inertia, power, and direction. When we were finally carrying rifles, a common misjudgment of speed and control could end in the load lifting the skier off the snow, rolling him forward in the air, and driving him head first in the snow. The rifle, lagging slightly, would catch up and deliver the coup de grace by whacking the skier on the head.
Pinkie Rolfe took his licks along with everyone else, in what would become a hallmark of the 10th Mountain Division—the submission of senior officers to instruction from experts of lower rank. It would be one of many anomalies peculiar to the mountain troops and a big part of the outfit’s egalitarian nature. Colonel Rolfe got a small measure of revenge, though. The 87th Regiment at Fort Lewis kept a large stable of mules and horses. As a light division, designed to operate in largely roadless terrain, the Army planned for the 10th to haul its artillery and other supplies with the sturdy, long-eared Missouri mules. A sign overarching the camp gate said it all: THROUGH THESE PORTALS PASS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MULES IN THE WORLD.
As an old cavalryman, Rolfe insisted that his officers spend at least some time riding. After a particularly galling experience that ended with the rider on the ground and the horse standing calmly over him, Lt. John Jay explained in skiers’ terms to the snickering faces above him, “I must have caught an edge.”
The soldiers’ packs grew still heavier until, fully loaded for multiple nights out in the snow, they weighed ninety pounds—one hundred, if you counted the rifle strapped to the side. When they fell, smaller skiers couldn’t get up off the snow without first wriggling out of their shoulder straps. And then there was the problem of hoisting the bursting rucksack back up. The men learned to pull each other up off the ground or to offer to hold the pack while a comrade maneuvered beneath it on his long, slippery feet. Friedl Pfeifer said in the film Fire on the Mountain, “We had a philosophy to helping each other. That’s the main thing in the mountains.”
Commanders realized eventually that this sort of backbreaking load would not do in combat; the troopers would have no energy left for fighting. But the ninety-pound pack bonded soldiers who suffered through the training and were stronger for it. A group of 87th men even wrote a song about it. The self-styled 87th Mountain Infantry Glee Club was made up mostly of eastern college men with a history of irreverent, satirical singing. John Jay, of Williams College, was one, as was Dartmouth’s Charles McLane. The best lyricist in the bunch turned out to be Ralph Bromaghin, a Sun Valley ski instructor. He came up with the words to “Ninety Pounds of Rucksack,” which was sung to the Navy tune “Bell Bottom Trousers.”
I was a barmaid in a mountain inn.
There I learned the wages, the miseries of sin.
Along came a skier fresh from the slopes.
He’s the one that ruined me and shattered all my hopes.
Singing ninety pounds of rucksack, a pound of grub or two.
He’ll schuss the mountains like his daddy used to do.
He asked me for a candle to light his way to bed
.
He asked me for a kerchief to cover up his head.
I like a foolish maid and thinking it no harm
Jumped into the skier’s bed to keep the skier warm.
Singing ninety pounds of rucksack, a pound of grub or two.
He’ll schuss the mountains like his daddy used to do.
Early in the morning before the break of day
He handed me a five note and with it he did say:
Take this my darling for the damage I have done.
You may have a daughter, you may have a son.
Now, if you have a daughter, bounce her on your knee.
But if you have a son, send the bastard out to ski.
Singing ninety pounds of rucksack, a pound of grub or two.
He’ll schuss the mountains like his daddy used to do.
The moral of this story, as you can plainly see
Is never trust a skier an inch above your knee.
For I trusted one, and now look at me—
I’ve got a bastard in the Mountain Infantry.
Singing ninety pounds of rucksack, a pound of grub or two.
He’ll schuss the mountains like his daddy used to do.
This would become the 87th’s, and later the division’s, trademark drinking, marching, all-around good-time song. The men regularly belted out at least a dozen others. Some were send-ups of popular tunes, and many more were inspired by the singing and yodeling traditions of the Europeans.
The Gemütlichkeit—the camaraderie—flowed, but inevitably, Paradise had to end. The lodge wasn’t big enough to accommodate even one battalion (about a thousand men), let alone a full regiment (three battalions) or the three regiments it would take to fill out a division. And the lease with the National Park Service was up. The Army knew from the start that it would have to find a permanent home for the 10th somewhere else. Preferably one that was outside the confines of a national park. Paradise had been perfect for skiing but was not ideal for a skiing army. The Park Service had grudgingly allowed the men of the 87th to carry rifles, for example, but they couldn’t fire them, not even blanks. Too disruptive to wildlife.
The Army needed a place big enough for division-sized maneuvers, a place it could fire live ammunition, a place far enough from the public eye to screen the young division’s missteps. And there would be plenty of those. No one involved had done this before—build a mountain division from scratch. Not even Minnie Dole knew what it should look like, how it should be equipped and organized. Paradise was a start, a good start, but just one in what would become a long line of experiments. The men who got to know Paradise weren’t told at the time, but by the spring of 1942, well before the snow had melted, a new, permanent home for the mountain infantry was under construction in Colorado.
Meanwhile, in May, a cadre of some of the 87th’s most experienced skiers finished the season on Rainier with a bravura ski ascent to the summit. The idea of, or justification for, the climb was to test equipment and rations under conditions more extreme than those at the lodge’s five-thousand-foot elevation—as if any of the skiers needed justification to climb the peak that had hovered all winter, in Charles Bradley’s words, “almost straight overhead, a detached mass of ice, rock and swirling snow, floating in the sky, inaccessible, threatening, beckoning.” The Quartermaster General’s office had been working tirelessly to come up with equipment that would meet the imagined needs of a winter fighting force. The trouble was, there were no specifications (no one knew, for example, how much loft was needed in a down sleeping bag to keep a body warm at a given air temperature) and little in the way of test results.
The troops at Paradise had experimented all winter with a variety of civilian-made boots and rucksacks, sleeping bags and mountain tents, socks and sweaters, and so on. They’d tested, briefly, a diet of pure Indian pemmican: dried meat, fat, and berries pressed into near-indigestible loaves. They’d tried different kinds of snowshoes and skis and tinkered with a motorized sled that looked like a giant shoehorn with a lawnmower engine on the back. This precursor to the snowmobile was as difficult to control as a bumper car and a good deal more dangerous. Minnie Dole himself test-drove the thing on one of his visits to Rainier. “Pinkie Rolfe did his best to kill me off,” he wrote later, “by sending me off on a test motorized toboggan to climb a 75-degree grade on which the toboggan turned over backwards. Somehow I survived.”
The Rainier climbers meant to put this gear (minus the toboggan) to the test at altitude, on the glaciers, in wind and cold and avalanche conditions. Should the 10th be called on to fight in the Alps—the Austrian Jaegers and Italian Alpini had battled to a bloody draw on the peaks of the Sud Tyrol in World War I—then this knowledge could prove invaluable.
Ten men started out on May 8 under the command of Capt. Albert Jackman. John Jay kept the weather records and brought along his movie camera. A well-known Swiss mountaineer, Peter Gabriel, was in charge of technical climbing. And Charles Bradley went along as “co-ordinator of 87th menus.”
At two intermediate camps along the route, they spent time acclimating and trying to figure out the new, waterproof, zip-together tents. But mostly, in brilliant, sunny weather, it seems they practiced cooking and eating and making pretty tracks in the wide-open snowfields. Or so it appears in the rough footage John Jay shot. There’s a lot of melting of snow for hot chocolate, scenes of dehydrated flakes (of what, it is not clear) being added to cans of boiling water. At Camp 2, the last stop before the summit, the camera lingers on a grinning soldier, his one-burner stove sputtering away in a nicely carved snow kitchen, frying bacon.
In Jay’s unofficial report after the fact, he mentions three “findings.” First, that the stoves “produced deadly gas when used inside the tents.” Mystified at first by their wooziness, Jackman radioed down to a doctor at the base who “cleared the matter up.” They were lucky somebody hadn’t died from carbon monoxide fumes, and thereafter they either cooked outside on the snow or made sure to have proper ventilation inside the tent.
Second, the pyramid tents themselves were a disaster. Made of coated, waterproof nylon, the walls were impervious, in either direction. Condensed breath from the four men inside froze on the ceiling and showered “snowstorms” on anyone who bumped the material even slightly. Zippers froze and broke. The whole setup was heavy and recalcitrant. Nevertheless, the Army ordered forty thousand of them.
The third finding was that the food was generally excellent, especially the cocoa, the powdered bouillon, and the canned meat, which became the basic ingredients in the much-maligned but effective and universal “U.S. Army Field Ration K,” or K ration. Jay did recommend more sugar in the diet for high altitude and cautioned that “cooking times need to be doubled and tripled thanks to [the low boiling temperature of water at] elevation and the need to melt snow.”
In all, the Rainier ski expedition tested the following (listed in the Army’s particular style, nouns first):
Bags, sleeping
Tents, ski, sectional & Modified Mead (by Abercrombie, NY $68.00)
Boots, universal, felt, mukluks
Goggles
Rucksacks
Packframes
Poles, ski
Radiophones
Stoves
Kettles
Sweaters
Toque
Snowshovel, Bernina [type]
Trousers, ski, wool; and trousers, mountain, windproof
Gaiters
Crampons (copied from a pair of imported Eckensteins)
Rope, climbing, manila
Mitt, ski, outer
Mittens, wool
Gloves, wool
Climbers, ski, mohair
Headband
Mattress, rubber, pneumatic, double cell & single cell
Mattress, tampico fibre
Parka, ski
Axes, ice
On May 16, 1942, the party left Camp 2 at 12,300 feet, without their skis, for the push to the summit. Corporal Peter Gabriel had decid
ed that they would be safer on foot as they crossed the crevasses. What’s more, he correctly assumed that most of the soft snow had been blown from the summit dome, exposing an icy surface too dangerous to attempt on skis. Gabriel probably hadn’t read the account of the first (and only previous) ski ascent of Mount Rainier on July 2, 1939, but it would only have confirmed his decision. Sigurd Hall, one of the summiteers three years before, told a Seattle newspaper that his party had to crampon down to 12,000 feet before getting back on skis: “We couldn’t ski down [from the summit]. It was wash-boardy and hard as a stone. Even metal edges wouldn’t hold. I’m glad I made it, but I never want to try it again.” The men of the 87th would have liked to be the first to complete a ski ascent and descent of Rainier, but they recognized that conditions didn’t warrant the risk, and besides, they had a 7,000-foot ski descent still to look forward to, from Camp 2 back down to Paradise.
The day proved to be a fine one, nearly windless and domed with blue. Slowly, surely, they advanced, kicking steps in the snow. The fangs of their crampons bit into the ice, and their axes, like sharp walking sticks, provided a third point of balance. At last they were on top. Midwesterner Bradley was moved to rapture:
Finally at the summit, elevation 14,000+ feet and way above the cloud deck, we stood on the crown of the king. From there we could see the rest of the army of volcanic cones, strung out far to the south [Mounts Adams, St. Helens, Hood, et al], visible almost across the face of Oregon. Their white summits were well above the crest of the Cascade Range . . . a mountain range on top of a mountain range. We were looking at a small sector of the Ring of Fire, a belt of volcanoes that encircles the Pacific Ocean.
Climb to Conquer Page 4