Climb to Conquer

by Peter Shelton

  Unlike other camps, Hale was largely cut off from the rest of the world. Even if you could wrangle a pass, Denver was a nine-hour train ride away. By car the trip took half that, but almost no one had a car. The nearest town was Leadville, a once grand silver camp fallen on hard times. But Leadville was off-limits to the troops, because, in this busted, Depression-era mine town, one ancient profession continued to flourish. Nowhere to go; nothing to do. USO troupes feared the altitude and shunned the place, and the service clubs offered nothing stronger than 3.2 beer.

  Worst of all for the flatlanders was the prospect of strapping long, recalcitrant, slippery wooden boards to their feet. Skiing was a mystery designed to humiliate and embarrass. Warm-country soldiers took to calling their skis torture boards—“toe-chah boahds.” One sergeant became so enraged after a day of floundering in deep snow, he chopped his skis into tiny pieces and fed them into a fire. When Robert Woody arrived at Camp Hale, a ski trooper at last in April 1944, the first man he ran into at his barracks was an unhappy noncom with a distinctive drawl. “Where are the skis?” Woody asked with innocent enthusiasm. “So, ye want to ski?” his bunkmate asked, spitting tobacco. “Well, I hope ye bust your ass.”

  Many of these men asked for and received transfers out of the 10th. But there was a common wisecrack among those who stayed and learned to survive the mountains. They said: “Anyone who transfers to combat from the mountain troops is yellow!”

  In truth, transferring out might very well land you in a unit bound soon for combat. The United States and its ninety combat divisions had begun to play a major role in pushing back Axis advances in the Pacific and North Africa. In early November 1942, the first U.S. troops in the European theater had landed on the Moroccan coast near Casablanca as part of Operation Torch. Together with coordinated British landings behind German lines in Libya, Torch spelled the beginning of the end for Hitler’s forces in the desert. By January 1943, U.S. planes were flying alongside the British Royal Air Force on bombing missions over Germany. By February, after nearly six months of fighting, Allied forces recaptured Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands from the Japanese. And, most portentously for the men of the 10th Mountain Division, in May 1943, U.S. and Canadian infantry stormed the snowy Aleutian island of Attu, held for nearly a year by dug-in Japanese.

  CHAPTER 4:

  The Homestake Fiasco

  On June 7, 1942, a small Japanese naval force steamed into the northern Pacific and placed approximately eighty-five hundred soldiers on the barren and undefended islands of Attu and Kiska, at the western end of the Aleutians, the chain of islands lying southwest of Alaska. The idea was to create a diversion for the much more strategically important attack on Midway Island, midway between Tokyo and Honolulu. Japanese war planners had no intention of hopscotching the Aleutians fifteen hundred miles to Alaska, but the incursion had a chilling effect on the American public. U.S. territory had been invaded and occupied, and the islands did look on a map like stepping-stones to the North American mainland.

  Meanwhile, the bulk of the Japanese fleet was on its way to Midway with plans to knock out what remained (after Pearl Harbor) of the U.S. North Pacific Fleet. The Japanese brought a tremendous numerical advantage: 4 heavy and 3 light aircraft carriers, 11 battleships, 15 cruisers, 44 destroyers, and 15 submarines to go up against America’s 3 carriers, 8 cruisers, 18 destroyers, and 19 submarines. The Americans, though, had the incalculable advantage of knowing the enemy’s intentions in advance. U.S. intelligence had broken the Japanese navy code and deciphered key radio transmissions. In the ensuing Battle of Midway, carrier-based U.S. bombers attacked the Japanese fleet when it was still five hundred miles from its goal, sank all four heavy carriers and one heavy cruiser, and forced the rest of the fleet to retire. Midway would go down as a turning point in the war in the Pacific, but the Japanese garrisons remained on Attu and Kiska, a thorn in the side of U.S. military strategists, and a lingering embarrassment.

  Minnie Dole had imagined the 10th would be a defensive force, fighting a guerrilla action as the Finns had done, repulsing a Nazi invasion of the northern United States. But by late 1942, with German and Japanese expansion contained and, in fact, shrinking, that scenario didn’t seen likely. Where then might the 10th be used? Rumors bounced off the mountain walls at Camp Hale like echoes. Actually, no decision had yet been made about where and how to deploy the mountaineers. A lightly armored mountain division didn’t fit into the actions in North Africa or the planned opening of a western front in France. More to the point, this new division was not nearly ready to fight. Myriad questions still needed answering. How, in a vertical world, would tactical theory change from flatland fighting? How do you move men and artillery in large numbers over the snow? How will they eat and sleep and stay warm? How to attack, and how to defend? How will it all work?

  The early experiments on Rainier had provided some answers, but those had been relatively small groups of, in most cases, already snow-savvy men. So, in February 1943, commanders at Camp Hale ordered the first large-scale maneuvers into the winter backcountry. Some said that the troops were still too green, but the Army needed a baseline, some way to evaluate its equipment and training to that point. A full battalion—one thousand soldiers—plus a battalion of pack artillery would march five miles from near the top of Tennessee Pass to Homestake Lake at 11,300 feet. There they would camp and engage in a number of tactical “problems.”

  Problems of a very practical and debilitating sort began the instant the order came to march. Many of the thousand were new recruits who had not had time to acclimate to Hale’s altitude, and now they were being asked to go higher still. Under the crushing weight of their rucksacks—ninety pounds and more—they staggered up the snow-packed trail. Mortar men and machine gunners carried loads of up to 125 pounds each and suffered commensurately. Some of these men had not yet been taught how to wax their skis for climbing or how to use their plush climbing skins. For every two feet up the trail, they slipped back one. Frustration grew. Sweat poured down necks and into eyes cursing a blazing sun in an otherwise cold, blue Rocky Mountain sky.

  Nor were the humans the only sufferers. Hundreds of mules, on whom pack howitzers and other supplies had been loaded, wallowed up to their bellies in the soft snow. When the mules couldn’t make the grade, their burdens were unloaded onto sleds, and these were hauled by teams of sweating soldiers on snowshoes.

  When the long, white line finally stopped near the shore of Homestake Lake, the perspiration froze. For the next eight days, the daytime temperature hovered around zero. At night it dropped to 30 below. One morning, Cpl. Bob Parker, a young ski racer from St. Lawrence University, reached in a pocket for his glasses, to read a note he was to deliver to battalion headquarters. The metal frames shattered into tiny pieces in his hands while the lenses fell to the snow. A radio message from the nearby town of Eagle put the morning low that day at minus 48 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Tents were set up in orderly rows, but tents alone could not warm the frozen troops. Men with some experience, including the native Scandinavians in the outfit, knew to warm themselves from the inside out with hot drinks. They melted snow on their camp stoves and mixed up coffee and hot chocolate. The rawest recruits had not even been taught how to work the ingenious little gasoline-powered stoves that Bestor Robinson and the Quartermaster General’s office had developed. These men ate their first-night rations cold.

  For the next few days, the medics had their hands full. Men had to be sent down for altitude sickness—headaches, nausea, difficulty breathing—and for simple exhaustion. Frostbite was epidemic. In all, 260 men were treated for frozen extremities. More than a few pulled off their boots and socks and stood around freezing their feet on purpose to earn a trip back down to the relative luxuries of coal stoves and warm beds. Companies dwindled to just a few men. The “enemy detail,” which consisted of seasoned 87th skiers, never went into action. There was no way the battalion could have mounted a concerted response.

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nbsp; Clearly, the 10th had a long way to go. Still, there were successes; assignments were carried out, lessons learned. Bob Parker, for one, had a grand time on the Homestake “raid.” Fit from months on Rainier’s summer glaciers, Parker and a squad from E Company skied up the snowbound east ridge of Homestake Peak right on the Continental Divide at 13,205 feet, “looking for enemy.” A Norwegian American in the group, Birger Torrisen, gave a clinic in the art of ski waxing, specifically the use of tacky klister wax when climbing. He went the whole way up without resorting to climbing skins. And then on the way down, he sliced graceful telemark turns in the deep snow, cold powder hanging in the air behind him like a contrail. Parker and the other young Americans followed, awestruck. “Nobody froze,” he said later, sizing up the exercise. “Nobody got hurt. We delivered our report: No enemy. It was a fantastic learning experience.”

  The Scandinavians had other tricks to teach. Tummy warming, for example. They knew that if you needed to warm dangerously cold toes, you took your boots off and put your feet up against another soldier’s belly, inside his sweater. Two could play this game, and in fact it worked best when performed symbiotically. They also knew how to build fires right on the snow and keep them fueled with dead tree limbs. These men knew what to do with their breakfast ration of bacon: They slathered their hands and faces with the grease to protect exposed skin against frostbite.

  Right away, the experienced snow campers abandoned their waterproof pyramid tents and dug snow caves instead. These were the same tents that had been rejected by the men on Rainier, the ones that caused interior “snowstorms.” The Army’s double-goose-down sleeping bags kept a man comfortable even at these brutal temperatures, but only as long as they stayed dry, and with four men snoring, there was enough trapped moisture inside the tents to turn feathers to mush. Snow caves were both warmer and more commodious. Body heat kept temperatures inside right around freezing. Properly ventilated, there was no condensation, and a cave could be sculpted to fit any number of occupants, complete with sleeping shelves, kitchen alcoves, and storage areas. These cave dwellers used their tents only to cover the entrances to their underground igloos.

  Harry Poschman, an experienced snow camper in the mountains of Southern California, remembers visiting one such snow cave at Homestake on his daily tour of the various machine-gun squads. “This was the greatest. Five men lived in comfort without snowflakes to disturb their sleep. They invited me in with an air of smugness and handed me a cup of hot chocolate. Yes, the ski troops were finally getting better.”

  Harry and the other ski instructors from the Mountain Training Group practiced their slalom technique on the slopes above the lake. In his memoir, The Birth and Death of the 10th Mountain, he wrote: “Soon we were joined by others who understood this mountain life, and we conducted the first Upper Camp Hale Winter Olympics—unofficial of course. This went on until 9 P.M., when it was moonlight.” This is the life, Harry thought. This was what he had had in mind when he joined the mountain troops. The cold didn’t bother him. “One day Corporal Brelsford and I skied back to Camp Hale, a distance of sixteen miles round trip, just to get a couple of quarts of ice cream.”

  The Army organized various mountain-warfare experiments during the two weeks at Homestake. One involved resupply techniques. Mules still couldn’t negotiate the deep snow, so they had the Air Corps drop food in by parachute. Some of the packages flew well out of range over distant ridgelines or disappeared in the fluffy snow, but one drop did land enticingly nearby on the east face of Homestake Peak. A platoon was ordered out on skis to pick it up, then quickly ordered back; the slope in question was about to become an artillery target. In yet another experiment, the division’s artillery commander, Col. David Ruffner, decided to fire his howitzers at the peak, to see if he could artificially trigger an avalanche—to harness the mountain itself as a weapon.

  The concept was not new. Devastating snow and rock avalanches figure in the histories of alpine warfare as far back as Hannibal’s crossing from Gaul into the Po River valley in 218 B.C. That summer Celtic tribesmen rolled big rocks down from the heights on Hannibal’s twenty thousand foot soldiers and thirty-eight elephants. In World War I, a third of all combatant deaths in the Italian Alps were caused by avalanches. (Another third died of cold-related injuries, and the final third were killed in actual combat, mostly in summer.) Over the two winters of 1915–16 and 1916–17, sixty thousand men perished in snow slides, nine thousand in one week at Christmas 1916, when thirteen feet of snow fell above tree-line. Avalanches swept away fixed ropes, communications lines, even iron ladders bolted to the rock. Whole companies were buried without a trace. Bodies of the swept-away are still melting out of Tyrolean glaciers today.

  There is no evidence that either the Austrian Jaegers or the Italian Alpini used artillery to purposely set off avalanches on one another; big snowfalls and natural slide cycles at high altitudes were deadly enough. But what if, from a distance, one could bring tons of snow crashing down on an unwary enemy? Colonel Ruffner was about to find out. Most of the battalion plus a gaggle of high-ranking officers stood on the moraine at the far end of the lake in anticipation.

  The guns were fired from well behind the bivouac camp. Shells screamed overhead and burst one after another just below the cornices lining Homestake’s summit. Suddenly, the whole wall of snow fell. The avalanche gained momentum and volume until it completely obscured the front of the mountain. Millions of tons of snow plunged into Homestake Lake, shattering the ice on its surface. Poschman describes it: “The tremendous weight forced the water toward our shore, and the lake leaped into the air like a geyser.” Parker remembers the incident somewhat differently. He doesn’t recall there was much water in the lake, but that “a wafer of ice, six feet thick, was pushed right up on shore to within a few feet of the brass. We infantry thought this was the greatest show.” It might have been a tragic accident too. But Colonel Ruffner got lucky, and nobody was hurt. The name, Homestake Lake, was subsequently changed, and to this day appears on the map as Slide Lake.

  The drama at Homestake—experiment or fiasco, depending on your point of view—became known around Hale, particularly among those who didn’t participate, as “the retreat from Moscow.” Minnie Dole, who had watched the whole thing as a civilian observer, criticized the Camp Hale brass in a scathing report to Washington. Dole would retain strong paternal feelings for the 10th throughout the war, and his opinions had clout. At least one officer in charge of the Homestake maneuvers was relieved of his duties soon after.

  Minnie proffered a number of general criticisms, some of which couldn’t have sat well with Army traditionalists. He suggested, for example, that the staff “is rank happy, with rank at the top and brains at the bottom.” (Sgt. Paul Petzoldt, the renowned Tetons climber and guide, put it just as bluntly, if more in tune with his Wyoming cowboy roots. “Here come all these West Point officers,” he groused, “and they didn’t know a snowball from a spittoon.”) Dole knew that the wealth of experience in the 10th lay mainly with enlisted men and noncommissioned officers (Pfeifer and Prager, for example, never got beyond the rank of sergeant; Peter Gabriel was a lowly corporal), and he argued for a system of ideas flowing up the ranks as well as down—a heretical notion. In fact, such a system already existed, informally, from the beginning at Mount Rainier, even if it didn’t result in recognition or promotion for the dogfaces with the proper wax on their skis and bacon grease on their cheeks.

  Harry Poschman was right; the ski troops were getting better. But it was a circuitous route to competency they took at Camp Hale, a trip made more difficult by the bureaucracy’s inability to hear lessons from its underling experts. In that sense, Homestake Lake was a classic snafu—infantryman-speak for “situation normal all fucked up.”

  CHAPTER 5:

  “Too Beautiful a Place to Die”

  Harry Poschman wasn’t one of the Ivy League guys who gave the 87th its elite reputation. He wasn’t a college man at all. When the crash of 192
9 wiped out the family business (a Buick dealership in Pennsylvania), Harry dropped out of high school and moved to Southern California to work in his uncle’s industrial laundry. He never did finish school. But he developed a passion for skiing as profound as that of any eastern Brahmin.

  Most winters, there was snow within an hour’s drive of the beach, in the mountains east of San Diego. To the majority of coastal dwellers, this anomaly of weather and high elevation nearby seemed irrelevant. To Harry and a handful of friends, it was a miracle, and it fed their passion for the new sport. There were no established ski areas yet, no Peckett’s-on-Sugar-Hill with Austrian instructors to show the way. So Harry and his crew started from scratch. They founded the San Diego Ski Club. Members pooled together $15 to buy a Model A Ford, which they stripped down and used to power a rope tow at Cuyamaca Lake, 5,000 feet up in the Cleveland National Forest. Harry skied every weekend. He became the local style master, and for two years running in the mid-1930s he aced the slalom course at Cuyamaca to claim the county championship.

  When he wasn’t racing or working on his Arlberg technique, Harry taught himself the tricks of winter camping—in tents he sewed himself out of parachute cloth—on the slopes of San Gorgonio Mountain high above Palm Springs. With climbing skins and a sleeping bag and a miniature camp stove, Harry realized a freedom he’d never imagined before; if it weren’t for the laundry job, he’d never have to leave this peaceful, snowy domain.