Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  It was perhaps inevitable, from this vantage, for the soldiers to wonder which direction they’d ultimately be heading. The Alps? Norway? Many had thought that an Allied invasion of Europe would begin in Norway. This had been Churchill’s initial plan, and it made sense to the troopers on Rainier learning to live in the snow. Not that they ever were told where they might be deployed. Burma? The Balkans? In the Army, rumor took the place of hard information. Norway seemed as logical as any place else.

  But Norway would be scrapped in favor of a planned landing in Normandy—where there were no mountains and no need of mountain troops. Perhaps, then, the 10th would be called to make its way north and west from Rainier, out the Aleutian chain, across the Pacific and down the Kurils, along the volcanic necklace that led, one freezing, windswept, mountainous island at a time, to the Japanese homeland

  CHAPTER 3:

  “I Love a Soldier”

  The first elements of the 87th Regiment arrived at Camp Hale just as the snow began to fly in late 1942. They came by train from Colorado Springs, up over the Continental Divide at Tennessee Pass and down three miles to an alpine meadow at 9,250 feet. Thick swaths of spruce and fir covered the slopes on all sides of the little valley to about 11,000 feet and then gave way to bare, broad-shouldered ridges 13,000 feet high. The train pulled in to a Denver & Rio Grande siding at the foot of the meadow, where a sign by the tracks identified the place as Pando, Colorado.

  Camp Hale filled the valley—an instant city, built over one short summer at a cost of $30 million, specifically for the ski troops. (It was named for Brig. Gen. Irving Hale, a Colorado hero of the Spanish-American War.) White-painted barracks marched in precise rows beside the headwaters of the Eagle River, dredged ruler straight by the Army Corps of Engineers. Hale had bunks for fifteen thousand soldiers. The current 87th Regiment filled only about one-fifth of them. It was clear the outfit needed bodies.

  From the beginning the War Department had taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the National Ski Patrol System to recruit skiers for the new division, believing, as Bestor Robinson had written in the Sierra Club Manual of Ski Mountaineering, that it “is easier to train a skier to be a soldier than to train a soldier to be a skier.” This was the first time a civilian organization had been given such a charge, and early on, it worked well enough. Minnie Dole contacted each of the ninety-three NSPS chapters asking them to spread the word to local patrols, schools, clubs, race teams, search-and-rescue teams, first-aiders, and so on. He felt he had to be selective, given the special nature of the force (and his own particular nature), so he required each applicant to submit three letters of recommendation, attesting to skiing and/or outdoor experience and character, before he would recommend a young man to the 87th. An eighteen-year-old intent on joining any other Army unit had merely to pass a physical and pick up his orders.

  Most of the letters came from ski coaches or teachers or family members. All revealed something about the times. Many were funny or touching, and even heartbreaking.

  Private Elmer Johnson of Houston submitted a letter from his brother:

  Pvt. Elmer Wallace Johnson was raised on a farm far from modern conveniences. He has been taught to live from the many things Nature put on this Earth. He can find food and shelter when the snows have fallen and everything is frozen over. He can tell the direction he is going when there is no sun or moon to go by. He knows how to catch and kill small game without the use of a gun, and to sleep warm without blankets or cover of any kind. All these things he can do, I taught him myself.

  His Brother, Floyd G. Johnson.

  A letter in support of Stanley Pingree of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, read:

  He is an excellent skier and has the stamina to be one. He has always been a natural athlete and has never had to strive to be good at any sport. He just plain IS. I am not trying to get rid of my husband, but I do feel that my temporary loss will be your great gain.

  [signed] Elinor Manscom Pingree.

  Harold Loudon sent this letter.

  My Dear Son:

  You ask for a recommend. I think you are fit for the mountain troops. You always were a good boy and a hard worker. And I also think you are a brave boy and willing to do the work that is set before you.

  Your Mother.

  From Horace Stafford, who was in basic training in California:

  Last year I decided to join the ski troops and you sent me a blank to fill out. Boy, I was really rarin’ to go—but! A certain lil’ gal I knew in college winked her eye and wriggled a little and before I knew it I was standing at the altar and saying, “I do.” When I thought I had better send my application in, the little woman said, (quote) You are not going to join the ski troops and get your neck busted! (unquote) Furthermore, she tore the application up and gave me definite orders to have the generals put me in the air corps when I got drafted, so here I am in the infantry. . . . Seriously, I am very happily married and I love my wife very much, but she doesn’t seem to understand how I feel about skiing. Shoot the application out here and if I get in the mountains I’ll think of some way of telling my wife.

  Volunteers trickled in that first winter, but the National Ski Patrol’s limited net could be thrown only so far. And the war effort, ironically, made it harder to get the word out. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the West Coast became a war zone. Japanese Americans were rounded up and sent to detention camps inland. Defense industries and installations from California to Washington were camouflaged in order to fool potential spy planes; the roof of Boeing’s aircraft plant outside Seattle was painted to look like a city street. Fear of a second attack led to the mobilization of coastal observers and blackouts and to tight censorship of military movements and training exercises. This meant that no public word, via print or other media, on the doings of the Army’s nascent mountain division was allowed. Outside of the Seattle-Tacoma area, not many Americans knew about the ski troops on Mount Rainier. This made Minnie Dole’s recruiting job that much harder.

  Help came from, of all places, Hollywood. In the spring of 1942, Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century Fox Studios, had just finished shooting Sun Valley Serenade, a light musical comedy starring Sonja Henie, the Olympic gold medalist in figure skating, as a war refugee traveling with Glen Miller and His Orchestra. On location in Idaho, Zanuck had hired the multi-talented Otto Lang, Sun Valley’s new ski school director, post Hans Hauser, to shoot the ski action for Serenade. (One of the first St. Anton instructors to emigrate to the States—and founder of the ski school on Mount Rainier—Lang had already made one ski movie, Ski Flight, which premiered in 1937 at Radio City Music Hall with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.) Zanuck, a passionate recreational skier himself, decided to make a film on the latest ski instruction theory and practice, so that the future ski troops would have a paradigm to follow. He asked Lang to direct the instructional film.

  They began without help or permission from the Signal Corps, the outfit responsible for Army training films. But the Army did authorize a five-man detachment of its own best skiers to appear in the movie, including Lt. John Woodward and the unchallenged “best skier in the world,” Walter Prager. John Jay, former ski-film lecturer, was brought in to assist. Lang wanted exactly ten skiers in his action sequences, so he put white anoraks and caps on some of his top ski instructors: Johnny Litchfield, who would succeed Lang as director at Sun Valley; Sigi Engl, who would succeed Litchfield; Fred Iselin, a future director of ski schools in Aspen; and Peppi Teichner, who would go on to found three Midwestern ski schools.

  Zanuck made sure that the production quality far exceeded any previous military training film and maybe any ski movie that had come before. Most ski movies were shot in 16-mm. Lang had teams of men and toboggans to haul his 35-mm cameras to the summits. He shot in slow motion and from astonishing angles above and below the skiers. He insisted on shooting every scene in trackless snow. Jay recalled, “We had powder snow, and Otto got so excited at its pictorial possibilities t
hat he practically laid down martial law over the entire area. No one was to move from a designated spot without his written permission, lest the virgin slope be violated by a lusty track or two.”

  Lang called his film simply The Basic Principles of Skiing. The opening sequence shows a fictional recruit, played by the young unknown Alan Ladd, receiving his equipment in a “cabin” erected on a Hollywood sound stage. (Ladd confided to John Woodward that this role was a relief after his last one, an Army cautionary tale shot in a VD ward.) All of the ski action takes place outside on perfect Idaho spring snow. The film is a primer on the Arlberg technique, the one Lang had mastered in St. Anton at the knee of its inventor, Hannes Schneider. From the humble snowplow to sweeping, high-speed christies, Lang and his synchronous skiers made every movement look beautiful. Ten elegant skiers in white uniforms, swooping in line through perfect snow under a sky so clear it looked black on film. Lang may have made it look a little too beautiful. The Basic Principles of Skiing was not, strictly speaking, a recruiting film, but it did get around. And more than a few recruits arrived at Fort Lewis or later at Camp Hale grousing that this man’s army didn’t look anything like the one they’d seen in the movie.

  Hollywood fell in love with the 10th. Once Camp Hale was established, film crews descended on Colorado to take advantage of the stark beauty and the charisma of soldiers on skis. I Love a Soldier, starring Paulette Goddard and Sonny Tufts (released in 1944), examined the problems in a wartime marriage. Paramount “borrowed” companies of 10th men to show close-order marching drills with skis on shoulders (something that was rarely seen day-to-day at Hale), and had members of the elite Mountain Training Group perform in full whites for the ski action scenes.

  During the winter of 1943 Warner Brothers shot a home-front propaganda movie at Hale called Mountain Fighters. It mixed patriotic fervor (“And here they come,” the narrator’s voice fairly sang, “shooting down the long slope like a string of comets! What a vital role they will play in the destruction of the Axis!”) with a simple action plot. The hero is a trooper named Sven Torger—an obvious play on Torger Tokle. The real Torger Tokle never commented on Mountain Fighters, but the release of the film, in May 1943, produced a major upsurge in volunteers.

  Generating volunteers became Lt. John Jay’s full-time job. With the move to Colorado and the lifting of media censorship on the mountain troops, Jay was handed the job of public relations officer. He took up the task with missionary zeal. John Jay came from a long line of New York aristocracy, the great-great-great-grandson of the Supreme Court justice. He had been expected to carry on the family traditions of statesmanship and finance (his father served on the boards of the Globe and Rutgers Fire Insurance Company and the Pierce Arrow Motor Company), but he fell in love with skiing and cameras instead. At Williams College, young Jay spliced together footage from various family ski trips and called the film Ski the Americas, North and South. Jay often filmed on the move, holding his 16-mm camera at waist level while skiing along beside his subjects. Audiences loved the sense of flying, the spray of snow virtually in their faces. They also enjoyed Jay’s dry Yankee wit. There was no sound track to the film; each showing was narrated in person by the filmmaker. There had been a smattering of amateur ski-film lecturers before; Jay perfected the form, which was later successfully imitated by Warren Miller, Dick Barrymore, and others.

  After graduating in 1938, Jay turned down a Rhodes Scholarship and instead took a job managing the Chilean national ski team. He used that job in his second film, Ski Here, Señor. But by then, the war was on, Jay was a private in the Signal Corps—in their training-film unit—and he couldn’t take his movie on the road. He did convince his new bosses to send someone out in his place, however, in the person of the “comely” ski school director from Oak Hill at Hanover, New Hampshire. “I figured Debbie Bankart ought to be exempt from the draft, at least,” Jay wrote later, tongue firmly in cheek. The military paid for Bankart, a pretty brunette, to crisscross the country with Ski Here, Señor as a recruiting tool.

  Robert Woody was sixteen, too young to enlist, when he saw Ski Here, Señor at a theater in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. “When the first snow of the season arrived in New England,” Woody remembers, “and the John Jay film came to town, it really got your juices flowing.” As a boy, Woody had devoured the writings of Edward Whymper, including Scrambles amongst the Alps: 1860–69. In it, Whymper describes the first successful climb of the Matterhorn, after many attempts, and the tragic descent during which four of the seven summiteers fell to their deaths. This was the so-called golden age of alpinism, and Woody inhaled the literature: “the romance, the imagery of climbing and skiing became part of my mindset,” he remembers. Woody also remembers Debbie Bankart as “a very witty girl.” “Cute, too. She heard a yawn in one of the audiences and said, very quick-witted, ‘Need a pillow?’ ” Later, when he was old enough to join, Woody remembers, “The romance is what got me into it. Not noble thoughts about saving the world for democracy. We got the idea that [in the 10th] you skied a lot, and you got to go to Mount Rainier.”

  Woody joined up too late for Rainier; that chapter in the legend of the 10th was already history. A seductive chapter it was, though, and John Jay took full advantage of the mystique that grew up around Paradise. As public relations officer, he flooded newspapers and magazines with releases about the mountain troops, often with pictures he’d taken on Rainier’s slopes. He arranged press tours to and radio broadcasts from Camp Hale. He convinced Lowell Thomas, the voice of NBC radio news and a well-known skier, to promote the ski troops on his evening broadcasts. Life magazine ran a November 1942 cover story, “The Mountain Infantry.” A Saturday Evening Post cover illustration of a ski trooper dressed head-to-toe in camouflage-white became a widely distributed recruiting poster and an enduring 10th icon. Minnie Dole bought a thousand copies of the magazine with his own money.

  The mountain troops were now competing for recruits with the sexy Army Air Corps and Navy recruitment campaigns. Jay dug deep for ideas. He and Minnie Dole arranged for National Ski Patrol men to receive extra gasoline rations on the theory that each one was an Army recruiter. One NSPS patroller drove a white-clad dummy around a Chicago Fourth of July parade that drew 150,000 spectators. Jay sent full sets of the distinctive white uniforms to department stores around the country whose window dressers used them in patriotic displays. He and Dole went to the American Alpine Club for potential volunteers and asked the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service to distribute applications to their rangers.

  Probably Jay’s single most effective PR coup was his third film, Ski Patrol. This one he cobbled together from film shot during the 87th’s winter on Mount Rainier plus early footage from Camp Hale. There are scenes from the dramatic summit climb and clips of soldiers marching and practicing strict-protocol military skiing. But what must really have grabbed the young men watching it were the crystal blue-and-white days, icicles flashing in the sunlight, and very good skiers, off-duty (without packs or rifles), streaming down the big, treeless shapes above Paradise, their powder wakes like crystalline smoke hanging in the air behind them.

  Jay was already a consummate pro. He made sure to weave in snippets of ski humor, which would become a staple of later films. On weekends, the public was welcome to ski Paradise, and Jay’s camera caught all of the standard bits of slapstick: the poor kid trying to walk uphill on his impossibly slippery boards; the inevitable disaster when first-timers try to grab the moving rope tow; the flailing and the look of astonishment on a beginner’s face when he realizes he will not keep his balance on this run down; the smiles under funny hats; the pretty girls and their GI escorts.

  Debbie Bankart took Ski Patrol on the road too, to even bigger houses than had seen Ski Here, Señor—an estimated seventy-five thousand viewers all told at outdoor clubs and community centers across the country. At every stop she handed out applications for the ski troops.

  Taken together, it was an ex
traordinary marketing effort in an era before the country was knit together by television—an effort that burned an image (whether it was strictly accurate or not) of an army mountain division into the public mind. But it wasn’t enough. Over the winter, the 86th and 85th Regiments had been activated to join the 87th and together constitute a division, but by the spring of 1943, the two newer regiments were still undermanned. Minnie Dole realized that there probably were not enough skiers of the right age and inclination to fill the entire division. So, he rewrote the application in a concerted drive to land men with broader expertise: “mountaineers, loggers, timber cruisers, prospectors, cowboys and rugged outdoor men.” Thus was born the oft-used description of the 10th’s makeup—“from college boys to cowboys.” The Army approved of the expanded list, there being some in the War Department who still openly decried Minnie’s “ski club.”

  In the end, although numbers are not precise, of the fourteen thousand soldiers who constituted the 10th Mountain Division at full strength, about half were volunteers who came through the National Ski Patrol System. The remainder were supplied by the Army through transfers from flatland divisions, primarily the 30th, 31st, and 33rd Divisions from Louisiana and Tennessee. Most of the NSPS volunteers, whether they were skiers or not, came in with at least some outdoor experience. They’d supplied the three letters of recommendation. They were keen and physically fit, and they had an affinity for the mountains, or thought they might. And they generally took to the mountaineering ethos created by the 87th, with its singing and camaraderie and willingness—joy even—for strenuous work in the high country. These men adored Camp Hale and took to the training with gusto.

  Many of the transfers had a much harder time of it in Colorado, which for them became Camp Hell. They hadn’t asked to be there, and they hated every part of it. They hated the snow, the skiing, the cold. The air at 9,200 feet didn’t supply nearly enough oxygen for men used to the altitude in Memphis. And to make matters worse, the air in the valley floor was frequently polluted with smoke from the camp’s five hundred coal stoves and the Denver & Rio Grande locomotives chugging over the Divide three times a day. In fact, the air was so bad during high-pressure inversions, it sickened scores of men, and not just the Southerners. Many a committed mountaineer also developed what was called the “Pando hack.”